MONITORING OF ENCROACHMENT OF WETLANDS IN KENYA: A DIGITAL SOLUTION THROUGH A PARTICIPATORY APPROACH

摘要

Wetlands are part of public lands. Article 61 of the Constitution of Kenya (2010) classifies all land into Public, Community and Private, and these are defined in Articles 62, 63 and 64, respectively. Globally, they occupy about 6 per cent of the Earth's surface, yet the exact extent of Kenya's wetlands is unknown due to lack of a wetlands inventory. They are, however, estimated to occupy 3-4 per cent of Kenya's landmass, although this can increase to 6 per cent during the rainy seasons. Despite this small geographic extent, they provide many benefits, critical to people's socio-economic well-being and nature's survival. They are severely threatened and degraded and some have been even lost, largely due to human encroachment - settlement, agriculture, and industrial and infrastructural development. Lack of an effective and efficient monitoring framework for wetland encroachment compounds the challenge. Sessional Paper No. 12 of 2014 of the Kenya Wetlands Policy obligates the state to put in place monitoring frameworks for the maintenance of wetlands integrity. This article proposes a framework that leverages participatory sensing and crowdsourcing techniques, built on digital tools, to support the public in detecting and reporting incidences of encroachment into wetlands in Kenya, besides empowering public agencies.