CREDIT: JUSTDIGGIT
SUSTAINABILITY
Carl Lens
Head of Digital Regreening Justdiggit
Justdiggit is a non-government organisation focused on regreening degraded landscapes in Africa with AI-driven data analyses from Planet Labs satellites for pre-digging suitability mapping and post-digging monitoring.
“ We encourage the right methods of farming in the right place,” says Carl Lens, Head of Digital Regreening at Justdiggit.“ For example, we would only advise digging in areas where the data predicts a high success rate for water retention.
“ This data-led approach leads to a significantly higher success rate than that of unmapped action. The technology allows us to verify the regreening of millions of hectares remotely.”
The Justdiggit team launched the Kijani app in 2024 to onboard new farmers for projects like this.
“ By introducing a digital element to our outreach, we’ ve been able to scale our impact significantly,” Carl says.“ This shift
has exponentially sped up the onboarding process. Farmers can access high-quality training immediately, allowing the spread of regreening techniques to move at the speed of their mobile network.”
The app also allows farmers to feed data – like photos or GPS logs – back to the Justdiggit team to improve the accuracy of the satellite-based suitability maps.
“ The ability for farmers to upload photos of their interventions is a critical part of our data ecosystem,” Carl adds.“ By combining these photos with the user’ s GPS location, we can verify‘ proof of activation’.
“ While satellite imagery gives us a macro view of vegetation cover, these ground-level photos allow us to understand exactly where and how farmers are having success with different regreening methods in real time.”
Justdiggit can then produce AI-generated, personalised recommendations for farmers.
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