Co-creation of accessible and meaningful conservation data presentation for Ovahimba communities

The SCIONA project is a conservation project aimed at improving the sustainable management of natural resources in the Iona-Skeleton Coast Trans-Frontier Conservation Area (TCFA) by the indigenous rural communities. To ensure that the conservation initiative succeeds, meaningful data must be communicated to all stakeholders. However, research shows that the way data is currently presented is inappropriate or no aggregated data collected is shared with the rural communities at all. Hence, there is a need to design and develop a portal that enables communities, other researchers and stakeholdersto have access to meaningful information about conservation management in the SCIONA –TFCA. To achieve this community member involvement in the design is adopted. This facilitates the joint formulation of decisions by community members and other interested parties to improve the natural ecosystem management in the TFCA. A research through design methodology will be employed and the expected outcome is a rural community portalcapable of presenting visual and audio data, indigenous knowledge as well as numeric statistics.