New Customer: IFACS

The Indonesia Forest And Climate Support Project, or IFACS, is a USAID funded organisation dedicated to conservation of forests to reduce carbon emissions.

To do this, they work with smallholders in high-value forest areas to better use and manage their land without damaging the local environment in the long term. We think this is vital work. As IFACS say,

“Indonesia has the world’s third largest expanse of tropical rainforest, and some of the largest areas of peatland and mangroves. These forests are biodiversity hotspots and provide ecosystem services such as water filtration, pollution control and carbon sequestration.”

Working to protect this precious environment alongside the forest-dwelling population is something we’re very proud to be involved with.

Because this project is spread over eight different areas on three of Indonesia’s largest islands, it was natural to introduce some kind of mobile monitoring and evaluation tool to properly manage the scheme. Enter TaroWorks!

IFACS is using TaroWorks for three main purposes:

1. Information collection. Digital data collection reduces collection errors and allows field staff to be remotely managed, cutting costs. The GPS mapping capability of TaroWorks is also a key benefit to such a geographically dispersed project.
2. Training. IFACS wants to help smallholders protect their environment and become more successful. A common obstacle to this is the lack of access to information, markets, financing and technology – this can be delivered through mobile devices.
3. Monitoring results. Mobile technology get the data back to the analysis team more quickly and more cheaply than any paper solution.

We hope to continue to support IFACS in its work for many years to come.