Planting a tree is straightforward: you dig a hole, put in the seedling, and then cover it with soil and water so that it can take root and start growing.

Making sure the tree grows is another story. It has to be watered, the area around it weeded and monitored to ensure the cycle of work needed to nurture it continues.

When this set of tasks is multiplied to cover 5,000 hectares in at least 10 counties, a systematic approach is required.

That was the task Cecil Migayi and the automation team at Safaricom was faced with when the Sustainability team came calling in 2021.

The Sustainability team was working on an idea that, in 2023, resulted in Safaricom signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Kenya Forest Services (KFS) and Community Forest Associations (CFA).

Under the MoU, the three institutions would work together to conserve, preserve, and reforest at least 5,000 hectares of degraded forests in at least 10 counties. The agreement was to plant 5 million trees to bolster the State’s efforts of planting 15 billion trees by 2032.

Among the key areas of collaboration were monitoring and tracking restoration activities and deploying technologies in forest conservation and management.

“We had interacted with the Sustainability team; they had reached out with the idea, and we were the executing team, so we collaborated in terms of having sessions and getting to define what the problem was and also coming up with a solution,” said Cecil.

The result? SAF-TGIS, an application that would help monitor trees planted by the Safaricom team under the MoU signed with Kenya Forest Services.

While the app was created in 2021, it has gained more traction as the overall vision has gradually been realized since the MoU was signed.

Work on the app requires collaboration between Safaricom’s technical team and the members of the Community Forest Associations (CFAs), who live near the forests and tend the trees.

The agents on the ground are tasked with tracking the trees’ development. In cases where trees have died or dried up, the agents and the CFA investigate the reasons why the trees are not doing well, and the information is relayed on the application.

This is captured by Cecil’s team who use it to inform the sustainability team at Safaricom. The agents also capture progress of the trees planted and feed it into the system.

This information guides the sustainability team on what kind of species to plant in certain environments to avoid undermining their reforestation efforts.

The information shared to the system by the agents is verified through two stages of audit.  The first phase is capturing the number of trees planted, the locations and also taking photos of the number of trees that have either dried or died. The second stage of audit involves the sustainability team visiting the location where the trees have been planted to verify the information in the system.

Running the app is a synergized effort involving the quality assurance team, who okay the quality of the application’s operations, the security team who ensure the platform is secure, and the CFA on the ground to build goodwill in the communities where Safaricom is tree planting.

The agents are crucial in information gathering while the sustainability team build value to the app through their ideas.

Among the forests they are actively being monitored through SAF-TGIS are Kinale Forest in Kiambu County, Kakamega Forest, Nandi Forest, Ndaragwa Forest in Nyandarua and Kieni Forest in Kiambu County.

For the teams on the ground, the biggest challenge they face when operating SAF-TGIS is network coverage, where they find they can’t relay information from densely forested areas.

The solution for this is simply waiting to get to areas with better network coverage.

For Cecil, ever the techie, the evolution of SAF-TGIS is natural.

“There’s an opportunity for Internet of Things (IoT), where instead of always having the agent audit and verify what has been planted, we can have sensors that can help us track the growth of the tree, we can have cameras just to track the tree in real-time. The other aspect is bringing in machine learning because as we collect this data, it’s going to grow bigger and it’s going to be useful for predictions and so many other areas of opportunity,” he said.

To see the app in use and hear more from Cecil, watch the video below.