In the rainforest of Borneo, a teenager named Rani recently earned six dollars by photographing an orangutan through a smartphone app. It doesn't sound like much, but that small payment helped her family while also helping protect the endangered apes from extinction.
Rani is one of hundreds of local residents in Indonesian Borneo taking part in a project run by a conservation group called KehatiKu. Instead of relying only on outside experts, the group trains ordinary villagers to use their phones to snap pictures of wild animals and upload them to a database. In just one year, participants have collected roughly 175,000 wildlife records this way.
The idea sounds simple, but it's tackling a big problem. Over the past two decades, more than one billion dollars has been spent worldwide trying to save orangutans. Yet despite all that money, around 100,000 orangutans have vanished from Borneo and Sumatra, mostly because their forest homes were cut down or they were hunted. KehatiKu believes involving local communities directly might succeed where huge international programs have struggled.
The app pays people for photos of different animals. An orangutan picture earns about six dollars, while photos of more common species like birds or monkeys earn smaller amounts. "We're not just collecting data," a KehatiKu coordinator explained in an interview. "We're building a network of people who care about protecting these animals."
That network is already making a difference. Villagers who once might have ignored illegal hunters are now reporting them to authorities. Local communities have started organizing their own patrols to stop poaching in their areas. It's a shift that conservationists call transformative: turning people who live near the forest into its protectors instead of its threats.
Some experts urge caution, though. Paul Ferraro, a professor who studies human behavior and public policy at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, says paying people for photos can work well at first, but it needs ongoing funding to stay alive. Without permanent money coming in, the system could struggle to survive long-term. KehatiKu acknowledges this challenge and is looking for ways to make the program self-sustaining, perhaps by turning the wildlife data into resources that benefit communities directly.
For now, the early results are encouraging. One hundred seventy-five thousand records in a single year, from an app most participants learned to use on a basic smartphone. And a growing sense in villages like Rani's that protecting orangutans is not just someone else's job, but their own.