Enabling community-based monitoring with geospatial technology

Cocoa pods, Indonesia © Ruben Bergsma for UTZ

The challenge

Deforestation is a major issue in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, which together produce nearly two-thirds of the world’s supply of cocoa. Both governments have been working to end deforestation and restore forest areas, often joining forces with global cocoa and chocolate companies such as under the Cocoa & Forests Initiative. The significant progress made in recent years points to the importance of working on these challenges across whole landscapes as opposed to individual production units. It also highlights the urgent need to continue working with local communities to tackle issues around tree ownership, cocoa traceability, access to finance, and building resilient livelihoods.

A community-based approach

The Rainforest Alliance has a long history of working with cocoa farmers in Ghana and knows that the key to landscape conservation is putting local people front and centre. Over the years, the Rainforest Alliance has focused on establishing participatory landscape governance structures, such as the Sefwi Landscape Management Board (LMB) in the Sui River landscape, which is one of West Africa’s most important cocoa-growing areas and includes five forest reserves. LMBs facilitate engagement with different stakeholders across a landscape, including the private sector and government, and make sure the voice of local communities is heard. This project sought to further empower the Sefwi LMB by co-creating a landscape monitoring system that allows the LMB to monitor forest and landscape performance in a way that is science-driven, credible, user-friendly and ensures data integrity.

The solution

The so-called Hybrid Community-based Monitoring System (HCMS) was built and tested with local communities in the Sui River landscape and the Sefwi LMB to reflect local needs and priorities. Olam Ghana participated in various workshops to provide the perspective from a global actor in the cocoa sector. The project also engaged with local and national government officials in the design of the system, especially in the development of the tree registration tool and to align the HMCS to Ghana’s climate policy and reporting efforts.

The HCMS dashboard enables the LMB to see the status of its activities in the landscape (for example tree planting, capacity building, income diversification) and to investigate land cover change in the region over the last decade. The local community is engaged in collecting the data through a mobile app with GPS functionality.

Data collection on coffee in Uganda © Giuseppe Cipriani for UTZ

Looking forward

This project was about co-creating of a sophisticated, yet user-friendly monitoring system as much as it was about training local actors on how to use it. That training will continue to ensure that there is local capacity to use the tool for decision-making and to unlock future opportunities, such as tree registration or access to finance in preferential terms.

The HCMS aligns with the SDGs and LandScale’s assessment framework and the Rainforest Alliance looks forward to adapting it for use in other landscapes as part of its emerging Integrated Landscape Programme. Tree registration might not be as important a strategy in other countries, but the system lends itself to monitoring a range of activities and, most importantly, it provides a way to actively engage local actors in the collection and management of their own data.

Download project outputs

Project Learning Summary - Hybrid Community Based Monitoring System (HCMS) | RA

This document summarises the learning from Rainforest Alliance's Hybrid Community-Based Monitoring pilot project. The goal of this 3-year project was to design and develop a Hybrid Community-based Monitoring System (HCMS) that combines GPS and remote sensing with on-the-ground data from the key landscape stakeholders for data management and reporting at a landscape level.

Project Learning Summary - Hybrid Community Based Monitoring System (HCMS) | RA107.72 KB

User Manual - Hybrid Community Based Monitoring System (HCMS) | RA

This user manual has been created as part of the Tech4Communities: Hybrid Community-based Monitoring system (HCMS) project. The project seeks to create a hybrid “remote” and “on the ground” monitoring and evaluation programme to support data gathering and management at a landscape level.

The project is a collaboration between four organisations led by the Rainforest Alliance and comprising the Sefwi Wiawso Landscape Management Board, Olam Ghana Limited, and The Sefwi Wiawso Municipal Assembly. The system was designed with extensive consultation with local communities in the Sui River landscape, Western North region of Ghana.

This user manual aims to assist users on how to use the HCMS platform to collect and visualise data collected.

User Manual - Hybrid Community Based Monitoring System (HCMS) | RA2.48 MB

Indicators - Hybrid Community Based Monitoring System (HCMS) | RA

This document presents the performance metrics and data sources included in the Hybrid Community-based Monitoring System (HCMS) that was built by the Tech4Communities project in Ghana, using the LandScale assessment framework.

Indicators - Hybrid Community Based Monitoring System (HCMS) | RA1.79 MB

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