.webp)
On the bus back from an assignment in Purmerend, I was called by Matthijs van Rijn, former co-trainee from my Alliander era, former fellow solar boat team pragmatist and now living in Nepal to set up his own company The Green Intelligence. With The Green Intelligence, he is working on his goal of planting productive trees in a degraded Nepali landscape. He is looking for a way to increase the viability of planted trees and wonders how much time and effort it would take to build a mobile app that can help that goal.
What about CO2 compensation?
Everyone will have heard of CO2 compensation by planting trees and many people will have the feeling that it is all difficult to control what actually comes off the ground. After a few years, who will see if the planted trees are growing? Only trees that grow into forests will actually absorb CO2. The Green Intelligence focuses on planting fruit and nut trees, or trees for medicinal purposes, to give local farmers an economic reason to ensure that the trees grow. Not a monoculture where you can quickly put a lot of seedlings in, but a bio-diverse and productive food forest that is well cared for.
The idea for an app
But still, how can you demonstrate how the planted trees are doing? How can you scale up? If you have to visit every village and monitor the growth on each plot, it will be an expensive thing. So how nice would it be if the farmers could do everything themselves? And teach and motivate each other to plant more trees. So Matthijs has an app idea for that.
Can we also let farmers pick up those young trees to plant immediately download an app to convey the planting instructions and, above all, to register the planted trees? Does it include a photo (with GPS data) so that there is clarity about the condition of the tree? And can we motivate farmers to take care of the trees and monitor this with a financial incentive by uploading new photos every six months? So that we thus have a good picture of growth and that farmers are even more inclined to take good care of the trees?
Using our skills for a good cause
At Quatronic, we have a lot of young people around who want to do something useful for the world. In addition, we have the philosophy that we do not want our people to work for customers for 40 hours a week, but want to give them space to develop themselves and the company.
With that philosophy, we had a team of 3 consultants create a “minimum viable product” in 3 days in which we can test the hypothesis that an app can help trees grow better. A mini project, with a short design sprint to understand what the problem is and design the app, a product owner who thinks along from Nepal online and provides guidance to the consultants, and the preconditions that the app can work offline and we can register at least 10,000 trees during the test period.
At Quatronic, we have a lot of young people around who want to do something useful for the world. We worked on this project with a lot of passion and everyone is looking forward to the moment when the app is actually used by Nepalese farmers.
What started as a simple question on the phone was turned into a mini-project within a few weeks to build an app in OutSystems that will actually be used by Nepalese farmers. How does the solution work? You can read that in the next blog!
For more info, check The Green Intelligence or invest directly into trees.
Get in touch with
Auke
