The road to trialing GeoSeals leads to Dire Dawa, Ethiopia
Fresh from our scoping trip to Ethiopia; we now have a clear understanding of what GeoSeals needs to achieve in our upcoming field trial.
A blog by Alasdair Davies, a Frontier Tech implementing Partner
The first few nights on the 11th floor of our hotel in Addis Ababa were fresh and pleasant, with a cool breeze keeping the temperature at a comfortable 22°C as we carefully pieced together a demonstration GeoSeals detector, ready to showcase GeoSeals technology to aid agencies and FCDO partners in Ethiopia. GeoSeals is our solution to the real-time tracking of humanitarian aid stock levels for aid agencies.
Over the next 10 days we planned to meet with the British Embassy, UNICEF and the World Food Programme (WFP), having spent the last few months discussing how we believed GeoSeals could support their aid distribution work, how it could be integrated into their supply chains, and importantly, planning our in-country visit to help us understand the reality on the ground.
Our plan was to first start in the capital city of Addis Ababa, with a goal to visiting local aid distribution Warehouses before traveling further afield to Dire Dawa, Ethiopia’s Seventh largest city and a key aid distribution site used to dispense both nutritional aid and healthcare supplies to Health Distribution Points across the region’s many Woredas.
(Figure 1) Dire Dawa, indicated in the rectangle above is Ethiopia’s Seventh largest city and a key aid distribution site used to dispense both nutritional aid and healthcare supplies to Health Distribution Points across the region’s many Woredas.
In Ethiopia, Woredas are composed of an executive and judicial council, with a Woreda Council the highest government agency in the district. Aid is distributed to Health Centres and Health Distribution Points within Woredas by both UNICEF and WFP, and it’s here that GeoSeals could offer an advantage by providing real-time information on stock levels of aid distributed across Health Distribution Points. GeoSeals will report the exact number of aid parcels stored and whether aid parcels are actively being consumed, the latter achieved by detecting if a parcel has been opened and/or is being removed and returned from a store room on a regular basis.
(Figure 2) Green rolling hills give way to an expanse of semi-arid vegetation from the elevated heights of Addis Ababa to the warm lowlands of Dire Dawa.
Once in Dire Dawa, we traveled by road to the surrounding areas to see first hand where nutritional aid was stored and how it was distributed to local communities. We discovered that a Health Distribution Point (HDP) could range in size from a zonal warehouse in a regional hospital to a single small room in a rural community, with nutritional food aid in rural settings dispensed by a nurse after consultation with a patient. These small roomslack electricity. We knewthat solar power to charge and power the GeoSeals detector(s) would be essential during Phase 1 of the trial.
“GeoSeals could offer value by alerting aid agencies as to when stock may become exhausted, together with consumption rate data to indicate exactly when there’s a run on demand.”
After inspecting several Health Distribution Points, some were found to already be experiencing a “stock out” and were awaiting a new delivery of supplies. It is here that GeoSeals can offer value by alerting aid agencies as to where and when stock may become exhausted, together with consumption rate data to indicate exactly when there’s a run on demand. We also discovered that cellular connectivity was available at nearly all of the site we visited, which is an advantage we intend to benefit from during the first trial, as a cellular connection will provide enough bandwidth to be able to update firmware and software running on GeoSeals detectors over-the-air, meaning we could address any early bugs or software issues remotely. In the future we intend to introduce our low-power satellite IoT solution to provide remote connectivity completely off grid.
In total we selected 7 Health Distribution Points and 1 Warehouse for our first field trial of GeoSeals, with a goal of installing GeoSeals equipment early in the new year. We intend to install a GeoSeals detector above each door at Health Distribution Points, routing a cable to the roof where a small solar panel will provide auxiliary power.
(Figure 3) Warehouse entrances will require multiple GeoSeals detectors coupled with high gain antennas to cover the height and width of doorways
At the Warehouse we will install several detectors around major entrances / loading doors to detect tagged nutritional aid entering / leaving, as aid is commonly brought in by forklift trucks on pallets, meaning we would need to detect tagged aid parcels at a greater range compared to aid passing through a single doorway. To achieve this we will introduce higher gain antennas and optimize placement of each GeoSeal detector.
(Figure 4) A Health Distribution Point (HDP) was found to be experiencing a “stock out” and was awaiting a new delivery of nutritional food supplies.
During our upcoming trial, data from each GeoSeals detector will be transmitted in real-time to the cloud for further dissemination as aid flows through the supply chain, allowing us to test the capability of GeoSeals to detect aid leaving a Warehouse and arriving at a Health Distribution Point - as well as tracking when aid has been removed from storage (i.e. temporarily removed from a room and dispensed to a patient) before being returned.
(Figure 5) GeoSeals has the potential to monitor stock levels of vital nutritional aid stored in remote Health Distribution Points in real-time.
From an analytical perspective, we are aiming to output targeted statistical information detailing an aid parcel’s ID, the time a parcel arrived / left a Warehouse, and when it arrived at a Health Distribution Point together with its status over time (i.e. still in storage or actively being dispensed and consumed).
The first trial of GeoSeals technology is currently scheduled to take place in early 2024 and will be trialed at 7 Health Distribution Points across Ethiopia. Learn more about the Geoseals pilot here.
If you’d like to dig in further…
📚 Explore learnings from the pilot’s first sprint — ‘Can we reveal the final destination of humanitarian aid?’
⛴️ Dive into learnings from the pilot’s second sprint — ‘Can you cost effectively track soap?’
📚 Learn about how the pilot prepared to trial the Geoseals solution — ‘Real-time humanitarian aid stock level alerts could soon become a reality’’
