Christopher Tidy was 10 years old the first time he took apart an engine.
The carburetor—the block of machinery that supplies a gas engine with fuel and air and helps to spark ignition—was a mess. It was blocked with thick layers of congealed fuel and dust. Tidy saw the problem and just happened to have some tools nearby and a burning curiosity about how exactly this thing worked and what he could do to fix it. That quickly turned into an attempt “to assemble a kind of Frankenstein engine” out of the parts of many discarded petrol engines. He disassembled the rumbling machine piece by piece until he found the offending parts, then doused the carburetor in gasoline, followed by water and dish soap, then scrubbed it clean with a toothbrush. The carburetor sat shiny and clean on his shelf until he sold it to someone looking for the right part.
Since then, Tidy has continued to feel inclined to disassemble things with his hands, see how they work, and, hopefully, make them work better. Quickly, he realized that it is not always quite so easy to just gleefully take something apart.
Product repairability is an issue that is building to a boil. Advocacy groups like iFixit and PIRG have campaigned on making products more repairable in the US, Canada, and across the world. The European Union has advanced legislation in recent years that compels companies to let users repair their own devices. These efforts have led to companies like Apple and Samsung implementing repair programs that make it easier for customers to fix their own phones, tablets, and other small electronics. Still, humans generate an astronomical amount of waste every day, mostly because we tend to throw broken things away rather than figure out how to reuse or repair them.
Tidy wants to help that process, and to come at it from the source: by focusing on product design, and trying to provide a framework for how that can be steered in a more repairable direction.
Since tearing apart that first engine, Tidy has focused on fixing stuff throughout a career in engineering and academia. (Aside from a brief jaunt in the late 1990s where he helped design a robot bent on destruction for the show Robot Wars.) He studied mechanical engineering at Cambridge University, and went on to teach engineering and work on projects at schools in Germany, Russia, and at the Field and Space Robotics Laboratory at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now 42, Tidy runs a volunteer repair workshop in Ladybrand, South Africa. It is not a business, just a space that he uses to tinker or help others repair their lamps, trucks, and toasters.
After years in that workshop, Tidy has put together some big ideas about how to build more repairable products.
Think Different
Tidy’s manifesto for better product design.
Courtesy of Christopher Tidy
Tidy hopes to inspire product designers to focus on making long-lasting products from jump. It is an endeavor that he understands after a career of designing products and seeing how wasteful the process is. The trouble is that a product designer has to bring a product to market at a certain price and under a certain development budget, and what they have to prioritize doesn’t always translate to a long-lasting final product. Mechanical engineers developing a product can feel like they’re being pulled in many different directions, Tidy says, focusing primarily on consumer preferences, speed of manufacturing, and keeping costs low. Designing with repair in mind often gets forgotten. Tidy wanted to do something to fix that.
“What we’ve seen is criminal groups who are invested in this region here, looking beyond this region for establishing similar operations,” Hofmann says of the international expansion.
The wealthy, authoritarian city of Dubai, within the United Arab Emirates, has emerged since 2021 as the largest epicenter of pig butchering outside Southeast Asia. According to the UN, international migrants comprise more than 88 percent of the UAE’s population, making a uniquely diverse, and potentially vulnerable, workforce readily available.
“Dubai is both a destination and also a transition country,” says Mina Chiang, the founder and director of Humanity Research Consultancy, a social enterprise focusing on human trafficking. “We can see lots of compounds that are actually operating in Dubai itself.”
In July, Humanity Research Consultancy identified at least six alleged scam compounds believed to be operating around Dubai. The research—based on testimony from forced laborers, data leaked from a cyberattack, and social media posts—identified potential compounds around industrial and investment parks. These operations “to the best of our knowledge are managed by Chinese-speaking criminals,” the research says, adding that they operate in a similar way to compounds in Southeast Asia.
“They call it a typing center. But a huge scam call center,” reads a one-star review left for a location in Dubai on Google Maps. Another says: “Mostly poor people from Africa working there and mosltly jailed in Dubai. No matter how much they offer you everything is scammed. Highly suggest never ever go there.”
Dubai’s police force did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment about potential scam centers located in the city.
Pig butchering operations may have emerged in Dubai because of immigration and workforce dynamics, but in multiple African countries the activity has started to appear because of an existing culture of organized scamming.
In Nigeria, where digital scamming has been a prominent illicit industry for years across numerous platforms, it was all but inevitable that attackers would adopt the conceits and tactics of pig butchering. The scheme is mature enough that there are now readily available prefab cryptocurrency investment platforms, templates, and scripts available for sale online to anyone who wants to get started. A gang that is already used to carrying out romance scams or business email compromise schemes could easily adapt to the premise and cadence of pig butchering.
“If you look at West Africa’s history with social engineering stuff, it’s a potent mix,” says Sean Gallagher, senior threat researcher at Sophos. “You’ve got a lot of people who have seen this as a way to make a living, especially in Nigeria. And the technology is easily transferable. We’ve seen pig butchering packages for sale that include fake crypto sites and scripts that appear to be tailored to targeting African victims.”
Nigerian law enforcement have been increasingly pursuing cases and even securing convictions related specifically to pig butchering. Gallagher and Intelligence for Good’s Tokazowski also say that in studying and interacting with scammers, they have seen technical indicators that pig butchering attacks may be coming out of Ghana as well. The US Embassy in Ghana has warned about the potential for financial scams originating in the country.
Enormous floods have once again engulfed much of South Sudan, as record water levels in Lake Victoria flow downstream through the Nile. More than 700,000 people have been affected. Hundreds of thousands of people there were already forced from their homes by huge floods a few years ago and were yet to return before this new threat emerged.
Now, there are concerns that these displaced communities may never be able to return to their lands. While weather extremes regularly displace whole communities in other parts of the world, this could be the first permanent mass displacement due to climate change.
In the Sudd region of South Sudan, the Nile passes through a vast network of smaller rivers, swamps, and floodplains. It’s one of the world’s largest wetlands. Flood levels vary significantly from year to year, mostly caused by fluctuations in water levels in Lake Victoria and controlled releases from the dam in Uganda where the lake empties into the Nile.
The Sudd’s unique geography means that floods there are very different than elsewhere. Most floodwater cannot freely drain back into the main channel of the White Nile, and water struggles to infiltrate the floodplain’s clay and silt soil. This means flooding persists for a long time, often only receding as the water evaporates.
People Can No Longer Cope
The communities who live in the Sudd, including the Dinka, Nuer, Anyuak, and Shilluk, are well adapted to the usual ebb and flow of seasonal flooding. Herders move their cattle to higher ground as flood waters rise, while earthen walls made of compressed mud protect houses and infrastructure. During the flooding season, fishing sustains local communities. When floods subside, crops like groundnuts, okra, pumpkins, sorghum, and other vegetables are planted.
However, the record water levels and long duration of recent flooding have stretched these indigenous coping mechanisms. The protracted state of conflict in the country has further reduced their ability to cope. Community elders who spoke to our colleagues at the medical humanitarian aid charity Médecins Sans Frontières said that fear of conflict and violence inhibited them from moving to regions of safe ground they had found during a period of major flooding in the early 1960s.
Around 2.6 million people were displaced in South Sudan between 2020 and 2022 alone, a result of both conflict and violence (1 million) and flooding (1.5 million). In practice, the two are interlinked, as flooding has caused displaced herders to come into conflict with resident farmers over land.
Stagnant floodwater also leads to a rise in water-borne infections like cholera and hepatitis E, snakebites, and vector-borne diseases like malaria. As people become malnourished, these diseases become more dangerous. Malnutrition is already a big problem, especially for the 800,000 or so people who have fled into South Sudan from Sudan following the start of a separate conflict there in April 2023.
AI projects like OpenAI’s ChatGPT get part of their savvy from some of the lowest-paid workers in the tech industry—contractors often in poor countries paid small sums to correct chatbots and label images. On Wednesday, 97 African workers who do AI training work or online content moderation for companies like Meta and OpenAI published an open letter to President Biden, demanding that US tech companies stop “systemically abusing and exploiting African workers.”
Most of the letter’s signatories are from Kenya, a hub for tech outsourcing, whose president, William Ruto, is visiting the US this week. The workers allege that the practices of companies like Meta, OpenAI, and data provider Scale AI “amount to modern day slavery.” The companies did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A typical workday for African tech contractors, the letter says, involves “watching murder and beheadings, child abuse and rape, pornography and bestiality, often for more than 8 hours a day.” Pay is often less than $2 per hour, it says, and workers frequently end up with post-traumatic stress disorder, a well-documentedissue among content moderators around the world.
The letter’s signatories say their work includes reviewing content on platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram, as well as labeling images and training chatbot responses for companies like OpenAI that are developing generative-AI technology. The workers are affiliated with the African Content Moderators Union, the first content moderators union on the continent, and a group founded by laid-off workers who previously trained AI technology for companies such as Scale AI, which sells datasets and data-labeling services to clients including OpenAI, Meta, and the US military. The letter was published on the site of the UK-based activist group Foxglove, which promotes tech-worker unions and equitable tech.
In March, the letter and news reports say, Scale AI abruptly banned people based in Kenya, Nigeria, and Pakistan from working on Remotasks, Scale AI’s platform for contract work. The letter says that these workers were cut off without notice and are “owed significant sums of unpaid wages.”
“When Remotasks shut down, it took our livelihoods out of our hands, the food out of our kitchens,” says Joan Kinyua, a member of the group of former Remotasks workers, in a statement to WIRED. “But Scale AI, the big company that ran the platform, gets away with it, because it’s based in San Francisco.”
Though the Biden administration has frequently described its approach to labor policy as “worker-centered.” The African workers’ letter argues that this has not extended to them, saying “we are treated as disposable.”
“You have the power to stop our exploitation by US companies, clean up this work and give us dignity and fair working conditions,” the letter says. “You can make sure there are good jobs for Kenyans too, not just Americans.”
Tech contractors in Kenya have filed lawsuits in recent years alleging that tech-outsourcing companies and their US clients such as Meta have treated workers illegally. Wednesday’s letter demands that Biden make sure that US tech companies engage with overseas tech workers, comply with local laws, and stop union-busting practices. It also suggests that tech companies “be held accountable in the US courts for their unlawful operations aboard, in particular for their human rights and labor violations.”
“Everyone wants to see more jobs in Kenya,” Kauna Malgwi, a member of the African Content Moderators Union steering committee, says. “But not at any cost. All we are asking for is dignified, fairly paid work that is safe and secure.”
The noise pollution, habitat loss and disease spillover that can come with mining could threaten chimpanzee populations in some countries in Africa
Ari Wid/Shutterstock
More than a third of the great apes living in Africa are under threat from the booming demand for minerals that are critical to the creation of green energy technologies, such as electric vehicles.
Africa is home to around one sixth of the world’s remaining forests, with the habitat found in countries such as Ghana, Gabon and Uganda. The continent also houses four great ape species: chimpanzees, bonobos and two species of gorilla.
To assess the scale of the threat to great ape populations, Jessica Junkerat the non-profit conservation group Re:wild in Austin, Texas, and her colleagues overlaid the location of operational and planned mining sites across 17 African countries with available data on the density and distribution of ape populations.
The team drew a 50 kilometre “buffer zone” around mining sites, to account both for their direct impacts on ape populations, such as noise pollution, habitat loss and disease spillover, as well as indirect disturbances, such as the construction of new service roads and infrastructure.
In total, 180,000 great apes – just over one-third of the entire continental population – could be threatened by mining activities, the researchers found.
The West African countries Liberia, Sierra Leone, Mali and Guinea saw the largest overlap between ape populations and mining sites. In Guinea, 83 per cent of the ape population could be affected by mining, the study finds.
The team only considered industrial mining projects, says Junker. The threat could be even larger once the impact of artisanal mines, where miners usually work in rudimentary and often hazardous conditions, is considered.
Cobalt, manganese and graphite are all used in the manufacture of lithium-ion batteries, which power electric vehicles. Other materials found in these countries, including bauxite, platinum, copper, graphite and lithium, are used to power green technologies, such as hydrogen, wind turbines and solar panels.
Junker says companies should stop mining in areas important for apes and instead focus on recycling these critical materials from waste. “There’s huge potential in reusing metals,” she says. “We simply need to consume more sustainably. Then it will be possible to leave at least some of the areas intact that are very important for great apes.”
She also calls for mining companies to make public biodiversity assessments of potential mining sites. “Greater transparency is the first step.”
In his years as a US federal agent, Tigran Gambaryan helped to lead landmark investigations that took down cryptocurrency thieves and money launderers, dark-web drug dealers, and even crypto-funded child exploitation networks. Now, in his post-government role at the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, he has become the target himself of a very different sort of federal crypto crackdown: For the past two weeks, he and another Binance executive have been detained against their will by Nigerian officials.
Since February 26, Gambaryan, who now leads Binance’s criminal investigations team, and Nadeem Anjarwalla, Binance’s Kenya-based regional manager for Africa, have been stripped of their passports and held in confinement at a government property in the Nigerian capital of Abuja. Neither has been informed of any criminal charge against them, according to their families. Instead, the two men appear to have been swept up in Nigeria’s broad actions to ban cryptocurrency exchanges amid a drastic devaluation of the country’s national currency, according to the Financial Times, which was first to report the two executives’ detention without identifying them.
“There’s no definite answer for anything: how’s he’s doing, what’s going to happen to him, when he’s coming back,” says Gambaryan’s wife, Yuki Gambaryan. “And not knowing that is killing me.”
Gambaryan, a US citizen, and Anjarwalla, a dual citizen of the UK and Kenya, arrived in Abuja on February 25, their families say, following the Nigerian government’s invitation to address its ongoing dispute with Binance. They met with Nigerian officials the next day, intending to speak to the government about its order to the country’s telecoms to block access to Binance and other cryptocurrency exchanges, which regulators blamed for devaluing its official currency, the naira, and for enabling “illicit flows” of funds.
Shortly after Gambaryan and Anjarwalla’s first meeting with the Nigerian government, however, Gambaryan and Anjarwalla were taken to their hotels, told to pack their things, and moved into a “guesthouse” run by Nigeria’s National Security Agency, according to their families. Officials seized their passports and have since held the two men at the house against their will for two weeks and counting.
Gambaryan has been visited by a US State Department official and Anjarwalla by a representative of the UK foreign office, their families say, but Nigerian government guards have also remained present in those meetings, preventing them from speaking privately.
When WIRED reached out to Binance, a spokesperson declined to comment on what the men or the company itself has been accused of or what demands the Nigerian government may have made for their release. “While it is inappropriate for us to comment on the substance of the claims at this time, we can say that we are working collaboratively with Nigerian authorities to bring Nadeem and Tigran back home safely to their families,” a Binance spokesperson tells WIRED. “They are professionals with the highest integrity and we will provide them all the support we can. We trust there will be a swift resolution to this matter.”
Hainikoye hits Accept and a young woman greets him in Hausa, a gravelly language spoken across West Africa’s Sahel region. She has three new cows, and wants to know: Does he have advice on getting them through the lean season?
Hainikoye—a twentysomething agronomist who has “followed animals,” as Sahelians refer to herding, since he first learned to walk—opens an interface on his laptop and clicks on her village in southern Niger, where humped zebu roam the dipping hills and dried-up valleys that demarcate the northern desert from the southern savanna. He tells her where the nearest full wells are and suggests feeding the animals peanuts and cowpea leaves—cheap food sources with high nutritional value that, his screen confirms, are currently plentiful. They hang up after a few minutes, and Hainikoye waits for the phone to ring again.
Seven days a week at the Garbal call center, agents like Hainikoye offer what seems like a simple service, treating people to a bespoke selection of location-specific data: satellite-fed weather forecasts and reports of water levels and vegetation conditions along various herding routes, as well as practical updates on brushfires, overgrazed areas, nearby market prices, and veterinary facilities. But it’s also surprisingly innovative—and is providing critical support for Sahelian herders reeling from the effects of interrelated challenges ranging from war to climate change. Over the long term, the project’s supporters, as well as the herders connecting with it, hope it could even safeguard an ancient culture that functions as an economic lifeline for the entire region.
The glossy red cubicles of Garbal’s office in Niamey, Niger’s capital, are tucked away in the second-floor space the call center shares with the local headquarters of Airtel, an Indian telecom. It had only been open for a few weeks when I visited early last year. Bursts of fuchsia bougainvillea garlanded the entryway to the building, a welcome respite from the sand-colored landscape and sewage-infused scent of the rotting industrial district around it. One lot over sat a former Total gas station that has remained unbranded since a drug cartel bought it to launder money and removed the sign. Running across the zone was a boulevard commemorating a 1974 coup d’état, which has been followed by four more over the ensuing five decades, the latest in July 2023. In the middle of the boulevard sat a few dozen miles of decomposing railway tracks that had been “inaugurated” by a right-wing French billionaire in 2016. For decades, postcolonial elites, promising development, have pillaged one of Africa’s poorest countries.
In more recent years, various Western players touting tech trends like artificial intelligence and predictive analysis have swooped in with promises to solve the region’s myriad problems. But Garbal—named after the word for a livestock market in the language of the Fulani, an ethnic group that makes up the majority of the Sahel’s herders—aims to do things differently. Building on an approach pioneered by a 37-year-old American data scientist named Alex Orenstein, Garbal is focused on how humbler technologies might effectively support the 80% of Nigeriens who live off livestock and the land.
“There’s still this idea of ‘How can we use new tech?’ But the tech is already there—we just need to be more intentional in applying it,” Orenstein says, arguing that donor enthusiasm for shiny, complex solutions is often misplaced. “All of our big wins have come from taking some basic-ass shit and making it work.”
Workers in the Garbal call center in Niamey are able to review data to help herders.
HANNAH RAE ARMSTRONG
Garbal’s work comes down to data and, critically, who should have access to it. Recent advances in data collection—both from geosatellites and from herders themselves—have generated an abundance of information on ground cover quantity and quality, water availability, rain forecasts, livestock concentrations, and more. The resulting breakthroughs in forecasting can, in theory, help people anticipate—and protect herds from—droughts and other crises. But Orenstein believes it is not enough to extract data from herders, as has been the focus of numerous efforts over the past decade. It must be distributed to them.
The work couldn’t be more urgent. The region’s herders face an existential crisis that has already started to shred the very fabric of society.
Herding—prestigious, high risk, and one of humanity’s most foundational ways of life—is a pillar of survival in the Sahel. In Niger, for instance, known across the continent for its succulent steak, animal production accounts for 40% of the agricultural GDP. Migratory herders usher between 70% and 90% of the cattle population between seasonal pastures, since they rarely own land. These pastoralists have historically relied on common resources, in coordination with local communities.
But the traditional ways are becoming next to impossible. The crisis stems, in part, from the changing climate: as the desert creeps south, and as the dry season stretches longer and the rains come in shorter and more volatile intervals, water, pasture, and other renewable resources are increasingly erratic. But the strain is also political: brutal fighting between pro-government forces and local groups with links to Boko Haram, Al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State has turned major transit hubs, cow superhighways, and wetlands into battlegrounds. Making matters worse, herders tend to be underrepresented within state institutions, whose land-use policies favor farmers, and overrepresented within jihadist groups, which appeal to this exclusion to draw recruits from herding communities. A common lack of schooling among children of herders further deepens this exclusion.
In their long journeys, herders sometimes drive cattle near or through urban land.
ALAMY
The result is that tens of millions of Sahelian herders who depend upon free movement are increasingly penned in. Things are especially dire for Fulani herders, who get scapegoated as troublemaking outsiders. So addressing the multidimensional crisis would not only help herders; it could remove an intractable driver of one of Africa’s worst wars.
“Ensuring that herders have land and water rights, and working out their access to these through dialogue, is an important part of the solution to conflict in the Sahel,” says Adam Higazi, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam and Nigeria’s Modibbo Adam University, whose 2018 report on pastoralism and conflict for the UN’s West Africa office remains a key reference in the field.
The question now is whether Garbal and a handful of other tech-driven projects can in fact deliver on promises to help stabilize herders experiencing rising precarity.
Aliou Samba Ba, who leads a regional pastoralist organization that has teamed up with Orenstein to get data to Senegalese herders, says he’s optimistic, largely because Orenstein is turning traditional interventions upside down: “We say he looks with the eye of the herder as well as with the eye of the satellite.”
When institutions fail
The Sahel stretches from Senegal’s Atlantic coastline across Africa to the Red Sea, bounded by the Sahara to the north and by verdant forests and savanna to the south. Much of the region has been ravaged by drought and insurgencies over the past few decades, but rural Senegal is still home to the types of spaces that herders elsewhere are fighting for: maintained, not overdetermined; protected, not overpoliced. There is climate change here, but no war.
Last September, I drove deep into the Ferlo, a pastoral reserve roughly the size of New Jersey, to meet with a Fulani herder named Salif Sow.
It was the height of the rainy season, and the Sahel was having a great one. The environment that greeted me was a miracle and a mirage—a desert burst into bloom. Tall, bony Fulani herders scrambled to keep up with throngs of lambs, goats, cows, and camels spread out over a seemingly infinite expanse of green grass and lushly foliated trees. The Ferlo was brimming with carefully maintained wells, abundantly filled seasonal ponds, and clearly marked pastoralist corridors, with the country’s biggest wholesale livestock market just a few hours’ ride by donkey cart. There were no paved roads, no commercial farmland, and no extremist recruiters for hundreds of miles in any direction.
Herders have to make complex calculations when choosing where to take their cows to wait out the dry season.
SVEN TORFINN/PANOS PICTURES/REDUX
Not that the herding was easy work. “A herder’s life is difficult,” Sow said, welcoming me to his compound with sweet tea and a calabash filled with fresh milk. “There is not one day of rest.”
In a few months’ time, the rains would stop, the herds would exhaust the pastures, and the grassland would revert back to desert. And Sow would again face the difficult decision he faces every year: whether to stay and buy livestock feed to tide his animals over until next year’s rains or to lead his cows on a journey, and if so, where.
A lot of complex spatial calculations go into choosing where to take hundreds of hungry cows to wait out the dry season on the edge of the world’s largest subtropical desert, while making sure they have enough to eat along the way. Observing these deliberations filled Orenstein with wonder more than a decade ago, when he started surveying herders in Chad for a food security project with the French NGO Action Against Hunger (ACF).
In 2014, Orenstein helped ACF develop an early-warning system, mining new data sources using remote sensing—observing the conditions of grazing pastures from space via satellite imagery and, in some cases, with the use of drones. He also worked with pastoralist organizations to gather information about diverse conditions on the ground, ranging from wildfire locations to the spread of animal disease. He then began making maps using open-access sources; passing the data through an algorithm that he developed to treat and filter imagery, he created detailed and accessible illustrations of rainfall levels and vegetation that became a rare reliable resource for herders and their allies. Aid workers in war zones would print out his maps and pass them around to herders.
It was part of a system designed to extract data, analyze it, and send it up the chain to institutions, including national ministries, UN agencies, and donors. Being able to see crises coming, the thinking went, would give institutional actors more time and power to prepare their response and assign their resources. Being able to deploy emergency programming earlier would in turn afford herders a bit more protection.
In practice, that’s not always how it worked.
At the start of the rainy season in the early summer of 2017, Orenstein was tracking rainfall patterns and felt a knot in his stomach. The first rains had hit too hard, washing the dormant seeds out of the soil; a dry spell followed that lasted for several weeks. When the rains did return, the grassland growth was stunted. Drought was coming.
By mid-August, Orenstein was scribbling reports and ringing journalists to warn that disaster was imminent. But when presented with this evidence, the regional body with the authority to declare an emergency did not act. By the time it finally did, in April 2018—eight months after initial warnings were sounded—it was far too late to respond effectively to what turned out to be the worst drought in 20 years.
Data scientist Alex Orenstein marks up areas during a field mapping exercise.
COURTESY OF ALEX ORENSTEIN
Two months after that, in June 2018, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs urgently warned that 1.6 million children faced severe acute malnutrition, up more than 50% from the previous year.
That blighted season was also brutal for Sow. In March, his entire village sent its animals south to escape the drought—the first time anyone could remember doing so that early in the dry season. But Sow lingered, unwilling to take his sons out of school to help him. Nonetheless, he also could not afford to stay and buy several tons of animal feed per month at inflated prices. By the time Sow finally hired a few assistants and headed south with his cattle, sands had engulfed the grasslands.
They marched across the desert like soldiers at war, covering 18 miles a day. On the 10th day, they reached the Tambacounda region by the Malian border, where the cows would spend the rest of the lean season grazing on savanna woodlands and lush forest. Not all the herd survived the trek, and the cows that did were emaciated and more prone to insect-borne tropical diseases. By season’s end, a quarter of the herd had dropped dead—a defeat from which Sow still hasn’t recovered.
Democratizing data
Driving through the Ferlo in 2018, Orenstein was distraught to see the rail-thin Fulani herders trailing behind their withering cows. Across the Sahel, anti-Fulani pogroms were on the rise; some West Africans were taking to Twitter to call for their extermination. As weather, food, and protection systems broke down, it was easier to scapegoat the drifting “foreigner” than to demand accountability from anyone responsible.
The combination of starvation and ethnic massacres reminded Orenstein of the stories his grandfather used to tell of surviving Auschwitz. What good were early warnings if institutions were not willing to act on them? Not that the drought could have been prevented. But declaring an emergency sooner would have facilitated measures to soften its impact on herders. For example, governments could have sent cash transfers and distributed food for both humans and livestock at strategic transit locations.
From that point on, Orenstein decided to do things differently. If institutions could not be trusted to make good use of new data, why not get it directly to herders?
But delivering data to herders would prove extremely challenging. The centralized, vertically oriented systems traditionally used for data collection and analysis are better adapted to those institutions, usually located in capital cities, than to herders dispersed across thousands of miles of desert. What’s more, Sahelian herders are some of the world’s least reachable, least connected people. Many of them don’t have cell phones or access to internet or strong cellular service.
Still, the timing was good—aid workers and donors were increasingly hopeful that technology could solve stubborn problems. In 2018, Orenstein secured a $250,000 grant for ACF to broadcast data reports to herders in northern Senegal via text message and community radio.
The project launched several months later, though by then Orenstein was already working on another one: the Garbal call centers. Even more than community radio, the call centers, which are a collaboration with the Netherlands Development Organization, could offer data tailored to individuals in very specific locations over a wider remit. The first center launched in Bamako, Mali, in 2018. Another, in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, followed in 2019.
Orenstein and the Garbal team—roughly a dozen local data analysts, project managers, digital finance experts, and tele-agents with degrees in livestock management and applied agriculture—have designed different tools for herders’ needs. For example, they’ve offered ways to connect with veterinarians, compare market prices for animal feed, and use satellite data to find seasonal migration corridors and track brushfires. Crucially, the team has also engaged directly with pastoralist organizations, training and equipping herders to send back field data about vegetation quality in different zones—a piece of critical information that is undetectable via satellite.
A screenshot of a tool developed by Orenstein and others that is used by call center agents to provide location-specific data to herders.
Orenstein himself went into the field as often as he could to hold focus groups with herders and ensure that the way information was delivered would be adapted to their epistemic culture. “Instead of asking them, ‘Do you need rainfall information?’ I would say, ‘What kind of information do you need? And how do you measure it?’” he recalls. “Otherwise, the system would tell them to expect 25 millimeters of rain. Math is not how they measure. So instead, I would hold consultations on pond fullness, for example, and define rain strength in those terms—terms they can use.”
Samba Ba, the Senegalese herder, notes how effective this work has been in bridging the gulf between what tech had promised and what he and his peers actually needed. “Orenstein would help us forecast in September what the vegetation would be like the following year, so we could plan the next seasonal migration,” he says. “He came to us in the field, took into account our customs, habits, and knowledge, and used technology to give us a clearer idea of the grazing situation.”
Still, the most popular Garbal service has been its weather forecasting for rural zones. Previously, reliable information was severely lacking, in part because there were not enough ground stations and in part because satellite data was available only for urban areas. (Mali, for instance, has just 13 active weather stations, compared with 200 in Germany—a country one-third its size.)
Orenstein came up with a way to make rural forecasts more readily available. “We had the coordinates for every village in Burkina Faso. Why couldn’t we just plug those into an API?” he remembers thinking, referring to an application programming interface, a kind of intermediary that allows applications to interact with one another. “Suddenly, we were getting weather forecasts for places that weren’t listed anywhere.”
The API has enabled Garbal tele-agents to click on remote pastoral zones on a map and receive tables showing weekly, daily, and hourly forecasts that are updated with fresh satellite data every three hours. Honoré Zidouemba, the project manager for the Ouagadougou call center, estimates that during the rainy season, his center receives 2,000 to 3,000 calls a day about the weather. “Herders and farmers used to derive information from natural cues,” he says, “but with climate change, those are more and more perturbed.”
A tool created by Orenstein and collaborators allows a user to highlight the presence of active cropland across time.
It’s simple and inexpensive—costing under $100 a month to use—but of all the team’s technological innovations, the API has made the biggest impact. It’s a far cry from the kinds of higher-tech applications NGOs and development organizations have been promoting.
Since 2015, the World Bank has committed half a billion dollars to a two-phase project to support Sahelian herders’ “resilience” through strategies that include developing technological tools to map pastoral infrastructure. A senior humanitarian-agency staffer working with herders and technology, who requested anonymity to speak frankly, says the resulting databases have not been shared with herders; he calls the approach, which is geared more toward informing institutions than informing herders, “very technocratic.” (The World Bank did not respond to a request for comment.)
Meanwhile, ACF, the French NGO Orenstein previously worked with, got international attention in 2020 for reportedly using AI to help herders, a claim several people involved in the project say was simply incorrect. (“ACF does not use self-learning for its Pastoral Early Warning System. Presently, the analysis is done ‘manually’ by human expertise,” says Erwann Fillol, a data analysis expert at the organization.)
Climate change is making herding routes, like this one across the Niger River, increasingly volatile.
ALAMY
Other groups are experimenting with using predictive analytics to forecast displacements and herders’ movements. A pilot project from the Danish Refugee Council in Burkina Faso, for example, predicts subnational displacement three to four months into the future, allowing aid workers to pre-position relief. “Anticipatory action in response to climate hazards can be more timely, dignified, and cost effective than alternatives,” says Alexander Kjaerum, an expert on data and predictive analytics with the organization. “AI is a last option when other things fail. And then it does add value.”
Still, some argue these kinds of projects have missed the point. “How are high technology and AI going to address land access issues for pastoralists? It is questionable if there are technological fixes to what are political, socioeconomic, and ecological pressures,” says Higazi, the pastoralist expert.
Blama Jalloh, a herder from Burkina Faso who heads the influential regional pastoralist organization Billital Maroobé, echoes this broad sentiment, arguing that big-budget, high-tech efforts mainly just produce studies, not innovation.
Taking matters into its own hands, in 2022 Billital Maroobé organized the first hackathon designed by and for Sahelian herders. Jalloh says the hackathon aimed to narrow the gap between herders and tech developers who lack familiarity with herding lifestyles. It granted up to $8,000 to startups from Mauritania and Mali to track animals and introduce digital ID cards for herders, which could help them cross borders more seamlessly.
An uncertain future
With three call centers now open, and Orenstein serving as a remote technical advisor from the US, the Garbal team is striving to stay focused and make their work sustainable.
Nevertheless, the fate of the project is far beyond its supporters’ control. The region’s slide into violence shows no sign of stopping. As a result, even though more of the herders that Garbal set out to support have started carrying smartphones charged with battery packs, they are increasingly being pushed out of cell range.
Protesters fill the streets of Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, where nearly 10% of the population has been displaced in recent years.
AP IMAGES
Between 2018 and 2022, Burkina Faso witnessed one of the world’s fastest-growing displacement crises, with the number of internally displaced people exploding from 50,000 to 1.8 million—almost 10% of the population. Fulanis in particular were targeted for killing by security forces and government-backed vigilantes, and in some areas that are home to significant Fulani herding communities, militants destroyed as many as half the mobile-phone antennas. One tele-agent says the herders who did manage to call in from war zones told her how happy they were to reach the center. When I visited the Ouagadougou call center last year, a tele-agent named Dousso, a 24-year-old with a livestock degree who speaks French, Gourmantche, Dioula, and Moré, told me that “all of the coups,” as well as incidents in which jihadists took over markets, were also making it increasingly difficult to get certain types of data.
This can make the service even more meaningful where it’s still available, says Catherine Le Come, a Garbal cofounder, pointing to Mali, where Garbal is still accessible in some parts of the country that are now cut off from the state.
Yet Garbal, just like other efforts to get data to herders, faces the always pressing issue of how to fund this work consistently over time.
Nonprofit projects like ACF’s community radio and SMS bulletin alerts are pegged to funding cycles that run out after a few years. In March 2021, for instance, as Sow marched his cows 140 miles east toward the Senegal River, he relied on geospatial data he received by community radio and text message from two different NGOs, informing him where pastures were plentiful. But just three months later, both projects ran out of money and stopped supplying information.
Traditionally, Sahelian herders have been some of the least-connected individuals. But now more are carrying smartphones charged by battery packs.
THOMAS GRABKA/LAIF/REDUX
The Garbal call centers are trying to build a more sustainable model. The plan is to phase out NGO sponsorship by 2026 and operate as a public-private partnership between the state and telephone operators. Garbal charges callers a modest fee—the equivalent of five cents a minute—and has plans to roll out online marketplaces and financial products to generate revenue.
“Technology in itself has lots of potential,” says Le Come. “But it is the private sector that must believe and invest in innovation. And the risks it faces innovating in a context as fragile as the Sahel must be shared with a public sector that sees user impact.” (Cedric Bernard, a French agro-economist who has worked with ACF, firmly disagrees; he insists that the information should be free, and that trying to be profitable “is going the wrong way.”) Furthermore, the for-profit model means that Garbal—which set out to help vulnerable herders—is already pivoting toward providing services to farmers, who make more reliable customers because they are easier to reach and better connected. Zidouemba, the Ouagadougou project manager, says that its callers are now overwhelmingly farmers; herders, he estimates, account for just 20% of the calls to the Burkina Faso center.
In 2018, a quarter of Salif Sow’s herd dropped dead in a severe drought. But that season he made a sacrifice that is finally paying off: His son recently started studying abroad in Paris.
HANNAH RAE ARMSTRONG
As the tides of data that reach them ebb and flow, the herders themselves are aware that the real work needed to keep their way of life going is a longer-term political effort. As I prepared to leave the Ferlo this fall, the landscape still resplendent from the rainy season, Sow pulled me aside. He was a modest man, but there was something he wanted me to know. That very night, he said shyly, his eldest son, Abdoulsalif, was leaving Dakar for Paris to begin graduate studies at the Sorbonne, where he had received a scholarship—a fruit of the sacrifice that Sow made during the year of the terrible drought.
I reached Abdoulsalif over WhatsApp a few weeks later, by which time he had learned that Sciences Po was more prestigious than the Sorbonne and enrolled there instead. He is studying public policy and plans to seek work on pastoralist policy in the Sahel after graduation.
“Herding is a beautiful way of life, a space where I feel very happy,” Abdoulsalif told me. “It is extraordinary to see, so far away, the animals in their vast spaces. Far more beautiful than to live in a place with four walls. Even in Paris, I feel nostalgic for this life, this space of herders.”
Hannah Rae Armstrong is a writer and policy adviser on the Sahel and North Africa. She lives in Dakar, Senegal.
We need to understand the value of nature if we want to protect it—and that should include paying ecosystems for keeping us alive, argues Ian Redmond, head of conservation for not-for-profit streaming platform Ecoflix and cofounder of Rebalance Earth, a company that aims to build a sustainable, resilient, and equitable economy. He’s trying to change the damaging equation where “if the minerals under the ground are worth more than the trees and the animals above the ground, then traditionally, the trees and the animals have to go.”
Pricing nature’s benefits would help protect it, he suggests. Wildlife tourism shows that people are prepared to pay up to $1,500 simply to spend an hour in the company of an elephant in Rwanda, he points out—so tourists already know how valuable nature is. But what about local people? Filmmakers should share the profits of their wildlife films with those who protect or depend on the ecosystems they film.
“The irony is that people who live in the developing world, where many of these documentaries are made, don’t get to see them because their national TV stations can’t afford to buy them,” he explains. “We should make people care about the wildlife in the countries where the wildlife lives.”
And we should pay animals like elephants for their essential arboreal gardening, he argues. “Apes, elephants, and birds are seed-dispersal agents in tropical forests,” he adds. “They swallow seeds and deposit them in their droppings miles away.”
This has a hugely beneficial effect locally and globally, because trees do so much more than just store carbon. A study in the Congo Basin found that the amount of wood in a forest where elephants still lived was up to 14 percent greater than one where elephants had died out. That basin sets up weather systems that ultimately produce rain in Britain and Europe.
“Do you think any proportion of what you pay for your [electricity] goes to protect the elephants and the gorillas in the Congo Basin planting the trees that fill the hydro schemes in Scotland?” he says. “Not a penny. There is no valuation of that ecosystem’s service that every one of us benefits from.”
Ralph Chami, formerly assistant director of the International Monetary Fund, calculated that the value an elephant provides the world during its life is worth around $1.75 million dollars per animal. “That’s roughly $30,000 a year, or $80 a day if the elephant were being paid for the service it’s providing the world,” he pointed out. “But, of course, no one’s paying that.”
So, it’s time to pay the bill. “I want every gorilla, every orangutan, and every animal to be valued for what they do for the ecosystem, and for us clever humans to construct a system that allows that to happen,” he says. “At the last count, that was estimated at about $700 billion a year. It’s a lot of money. It’s not going to come out of the government’s coffers, it’s not going to come out of philanthropy, but it could come out of the global economy if we construct it thus.”
This article appears in the March/April 2024 issue ofWIRED UK magazine.
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
When governments find themselves fighting the threat of coastal erosion, their default response tends to be pretty simple: If sand is disappearing from a beach, they pump in more sand to replace it. This strategy, known as “beach nourishment,” has become a cornerstone of coastal defenses around the world, complementing hard structures like sea walls. North Carolina, for instance, has dumped more than 100 million tons of sand onto its beaches over the past 30 years, at a cost of more than $1 billion.
The problem with beach nourishment is obvious. If you dump sand on an eroding beach, it’s only a matter of time before that new sand erodes. Then you have to do it all over again.
Beach nourishment projects are supposed to last for around five years, but they often disappear faster than expected. Moreover, a big coastal storm can wipe them out in a single night. And the costs are staggering: Dragging in new sand requires leasing and operating huge diesel dredge boats. Only the wealthiest areas can afford to do it year after year.
Now, after decades of reliance on repeated beach nourishment, a new strategy for managing erosion is showing up on coastlines around the world. It’s called the “sand motor,” and it comes from the Netherlands, a low-lying nation with centuries of experience in coastal protection.
A “sand motor” isn’t an actual motor—it’s a sculpted landscape that works with nature rather than against it. Instead of rebuilding a beach with an even line of new sand, engineers extend one section of the shoreline out into the sea at an angle.. Over time, the natural wave action of the ocean acts as a “motor” that pushes the sand from this protruding landmass out along the rest of the natural shoreline, spreading it down the coastline for miles.
While sand motors require much more upfront investment than normal beach nourishment—and many times more sand—they also protect more land and last much longer. Developed countries such as the Netherlands and the United Kingdom are turning to these megaprojects as an alternative to repeated nourishment, and the World Bank is financing a sand motor in West Africa as part of a billion-dollar adaptation program meant to fight sea-level rise. But these massive projects only work in areas where erosion is not yet at a critical stage. That means they’re unlikely to show up in the United States, where many coastal areas are already on the point of disappearing altogether.
The idea for the project came from a Dutch professor named Marcel Stive, who had watched with frustration as his country’s government spent billions to nourish the same coastal areas over and over again as sea levels kept rising. Stive presented the idea to the government, which hired a large dredging company called Boskalis to build a prototype on the shoreline south of The Hague.
Even this experimental project, which the Dutch call “de Zandmotor,” was an unprecedented undertaking. Boskalis dredged up around 28 million cubic yards of sand from the ocean floor—more than the Netherlands uses on nourishment projects nationwide in a given year. Engineers then sculpted the sand into a hook that curved eastward along the shore, ensuring that waves would push the sand northeast toward beaches near The Hague. They also created a lagoon in the middle of the sand structure so that locals wouldn’t have to walk for almost a mile to get to the water. In the years since Boskalis finished construction on the $50 million project, the hook of sand has flattened out, almost the way a wave breaks as it reaches the shore.
