Monkeying around with the monkey problem — simple tech
2 years ago we setup out on a journey to find problems and solutions at grass root levels in villages across Nepal with 1 thought in mind — use extreme affordability to come up with products and services.
Design thinking became a natural progression in this.
About a year back, one in the group — Aakarshan went to visit his home in Achham, rural far western region of Nepal. He took some of the ideas and products that we had come up with to show and test there.
One of the products was an animal tracker, that would allow herders to know where their cattle were as well as to detect health parameters of the animals themselves.
Hearing about Aakarshan’s animal tracker one of the villagers (Nawal Singh BK) who lived on the outskirts (because he is Dalit) came to meet him. He complained about monkeys destroying his crops and wanted to know if Aakarshan’s animal tracker could be used for warding off the monkeys. Though the current setup didn’t allow for that, Aakarshan promised the person that he would come with a solution later on.
Few days back Aakarshan and Mayank visited his village, met the person (who was surprised that Aakarshan actually returned back as most people say, but never really return), gave him a hands-on lesson on a simple technology to detect monkeys and send off an alarm and visited the person’s fields to see and document the solution that the person built based on Aakarshan’s lesson.
The pleasant surprise was that the person, not only implemented the solution, he modified to suit his needs and came up with some improvement ideas for himself and for us.
Animal coming into fields and destroying crops is a problem we had come across in multiple instances. When some of our friends visited Bardiya National Park, people had complained about wild elephants coming into their fields and homes and destroying crops. As food becomes less and as wild animals and people come closer in contact, more and more such instances seem to be cropping up.
Even birds have become nuisance mainly during seeding and harvest times.
Having come across this problem multiple times we started to think of some simple solutions that could be helpful in these cases.
Over a period of time we interacted with the people to try and find the variety of animals that would come into the fields, the impacts they would have and were there ways to ward off as many of them as possible.
The monkey problem stood out as that of the world has other similar sized animals coming in more than others. Porcupine, small deers and boars all visited fields besides the monkeys, though the monkeys were the most problematic and prevalent.
Various potential solutions came up over a year’s period, where very low tech, extremely high tech ideas including machine learning and AI were discussed and tried. But we had set out few requirements. These requirements were:
— Device needed to be extremely affordable — 3 criteria for this was it had to be cheap, reliable and all parts easily available.
— Device needed to be maintainable by the user — we could go during training and installation, but we could not go back if a problem occurred. Explaining through phone to fix problem would not be feasible for complex systems.
— Simple — the design had to be so simple that it would require hardly any explanation for the user to understand and use the system. This requirement was extremely important as the acceptance for the system by user depended on this.
With these in mind the system designed consisted of string going around the compound and connected with a clamp and piece of wood. If the wood is removed from the clamp a very low watt alarm goes off.
The design is simple, all parts are available in local market, device reliable and most important it is very easy for Nawal Singh BK to operate as well as maintain if maintenance is required. He understands all parts of the technology and even has thought of few upgrades he wants to do my himself.
