PCI Named Top Finalist for P3 Impact Award

We’re thrilled to announce that our Satellite-Assisted Pastoral Resource Management (SAPARM) initiative has been named a top five finalist for the P3 Impact Award, which honors effective public-private partnerships that provide innovative and impactful work around the globe.

With support from the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) and Google.org, PCI has created a partnership of local, national and global actors to address one of the most pressing problems faced by millions of African pastoralists living on the verge of survival – how to find critical pasture for their animals across thousands of square kilometers of traditional grazing grounds, where conditions are in a constant state of change and increasingly affected by climate change.

The SAPARM project developed by PCI, partners with local communities, the governments of Tanzania and Ethiopia, World Food Programme and Hoefsloot Spatial Solutions to help millions of pastoralists improve their ability to continuously pinpoint adequate grazing land thereby dramatically reducing herd mortality. Grazing maps are generated using community knowledge, which are digitized and integrated with satellite derived vegetation data. Automatically updated every 10 days, these maps are distributed to pastoralists to improve their herd management and migration decision-making.

“Our partnerships have been fundamental in understanding the problem, creating a human-centered solution and effectively testing and scaling this solution to achieve maximum impact,” said Chris Bessenecker, PCI’s Vice President of Strategic Initiatives.

Technology, innovation and public-private partnerships are driving solutions to improving the lives of millions of people facing drought and flooding around the world.

The winner of the P3 Impact Award will be announced at the 2016 Concordia Summit in September, a forum presented by Concordia, the U.S. Department of State Secretary’s Office of Global Partnerships and the University of Virginia Darden School of Business Institute for Business in Society (IBiS) that brings together the world’s most prominent business, government, and nonprofit leaders to foster dialogue and enable effective partnerships for social impact.