Badili Innovations is a Mozilla Common Voice awardee
Project Lead Wangoru Kihara spoke with us about recent improvements to digital livestock manuals and reporting systems that help Kenyan pastoralists prevent herd diseases
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- In recent years, support for agriculture and livestock workers in Kenya has shifted from the national government to local officials
- Funding, language barriers, data sharing and reporting, and consensus building between pastoralists and officials have all been challenges to effective livestock disease detection and treatment
- Badili’s LivHealth Kiswahili Corpus project has recently translated digital livestock disease manuals from English to Kiswahili and built a new text-to-speech app to significantly expand pastoralists’ access to vital, up-to-date herd information
The Issue
Livestock are a key source of income for Northern Kenyans, but pastoralists struggle with disease prevention, detection, and treatment. Alongside pastoralists, Community Disease Reporters (CDRs) are responsible for initially identifying different diseases among herds and then working with outside veterinary officers to treat animals. But CDRs often encounter difficulties in both correctly identifying specific diseases and liaising with veterinary officers about treatments.
The Approach
In 2023, LivHealth Kiswahili Corpus launched a smartphone app for CDRs and pastoralists that helps them record, document, and share information about disease outbreaks. Using the shared reports and data captured through the app, county governments newly responsible for supporting pastoralists have been able to identify disease hotspots more quickly and to start interventions like mass vaccinations sooner to save more animals. The LivHealth team recently translated its digital disease manuals, which help CDRs initially identify illnesses, from English to Kiswahili, further expanding access to the information. Since launching its disease surveillance system, LivHealth has facilitated the vaccination of 3,524,760 goats and sheep, benefitting about 33,000 households in Kenya’s Turkana County. LivHealth’s system has also helped reduce the prevalence of PPR, or “Goat Plague,” from 21 percent to five percent in that same timeframe.
LivHealth has facilitated the vaccination of 3,524,760 goats and sheep, benefitting about 33,000 households in Kenya’s Turkana County. LivHealth has also helped reduce the prevalence of goat plague, from 21 percent to five percent.
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LivHealth Kiswahili Corpus is one of eight grantees in Mozilla’s 2023 Common Voice Kiswahili cohort. The program funds projects leveraging the Kiswahili language and voice technology to increase social and economic opportunities for marginalized groups in Kenya, Tanzania, and the Kiswahili-speaking Democratic Republic of Congo. These grants are supported by the Gates Foundation in collaboration with the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and the German development agency GIZ, as a response to a gender-conscious and community-centered approach to tech development.
With Mozilla’s funding, the LivHealth team recorded local voices and built an automatic speech recognition engine to translate the manuals into more dialects. The team also leveraged the funding to support and sustain the LivHealth mobile app and the organization’s website. Along with partner organization One Health Center in Africa (OHRECA) based at the International Livestock Research Institute, the LivHealth team plans to expand its programming into Tanzania.
What Does Success Look Like?
“We will know our work is done when there are no communication gaps between veterinary officers and the community disease reporters who are the first line of defense against livestock disease,” Kihara said.
Kihara’s Most Beautiful Word in Kiswahili
“Badilisha is a beautiful Swahili word. It means to change, or to cause change.”