Peace Parks Foundation rebuilds park ecosystems and technology environments with Azure

Nature without borders: Protecting, restoring, and enhancing the life of parks and animals through technology

One day, Peace Parks Foundation learned that a herd of wild elephants had arrived at the front gate of one of the national parks it supports. “We watched as the staff opened the park gates, the elephants walked in, and they made it their new home,” recalls Wayne Brider, ICT Manager at Peace Parks Foundation. “As a team, we must be doing something right for animals to be migrating to our conservation areas. It shows we’re creating the right environment for nature to heal and rebuild itself, and we’re providing the right support to enable the teams on the ground to do their jobs properly.”

It’s a remarkable story—and the foundation has many more like it. Based in southern Africa, Peace Parks Foundation has long been committed to preserving and enhancing protected areas, animal ecosystems, and the environment we all share. With a philosophy of nature without borders, the foundation focuses on conserving large transboundary landscapes, fostering healthy and balanced ecosystems. This philosophy is in line with the natural migration animals undertook before protected areas were fenced off and national borders were created.

Peace Parks Foundation oversees 68 million hectares of land within transfrontier conservation areas (TFCAs), and recently supported the reestablishment of the first Big Five national park in Mozambique, a country in southeast Africa. It has also relocated more than 18,000 animals and helped create the conditions for the birth of the first rhinoceros in Mozambique’s Zinave National Park in more than 40 years. In support of the Mozambique government, Peace Parks is helping maintain and increase additional wildlife populations. “Working for Peace Parks presents the opportunity to do something on a legacy scale that’s going to be remembered,” says Brider. 

Everyone who works at Peace Parks Foundation cares deeply about animals and habitat restoration. “I love seeing these animals traverse the way they used to, being able to return to watering holes and feeding areas,” says Bronwen Struwig, Financial Controller at Peace Parks Foundation. Staff are equally committed to working with local communities to protect wildlife and reduce pressures on what nature provides. They do so through collaborating on projects and programs that benefit both people and nature, promoting balance and peace. “We work with the people living in these landscapes to build peaceful coexistence between communities and nature, ensuring they are in a position to continue the legacy on their own for generations to come,” adds Ilze van der Merwe, Business Analyst at Peace Parks Foundation.

Given the sheer scale and criticality of its work, the foundation has made technology a “force enabler,” notes Brider. For example, staff use an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, built on Microsoft Dynamics 365, to plan, monitor, manage, and share information with the right people at the right time. However, its technology needs defy normal conditions. Working in areas where 3G may not exist means field staff have to build infrastructure, bring power, and use satellite technology to communicate from sites located up to several hours away from the closest airport. “If somebody says they need to deploy something, we have to ask if it can withstand being stepped on by an elephant,” explains Brider. If physical equipment is installed too low, it becomes a hyena chew toy. Placed too high, it may get whacked by the tusk of an elephant investigating its blinking light. “We’ve actually had Starlink receivers flattened by elephants because the motor whirred at the wrong time,” he adds.

That’s also why Peace Parks Foundation stress tests technology at a level few do. “If I can run something in a remote national park, I can guarantee it’ll work anywhere in the world,” says Brider. When the foundation wanted to make its environment more current and comprehensive, it decided to move to Azure. The more it can store in the cloud, the more accessible its systems can be—and the less likely they are to be affected by park conditions.

Sustaining and streamlining field, head office, and financial operations

Sustainability—in all of its forms—underpins every decision and action taken at Peace Parks Foundation. From a technology standpoint, the foundation seeks vendors that will be around to support and sustain its long-term projects, which may last more than 10 years. “It’s critical that our technologies grow with us and that we can implement and tie ancillary systems together,” says Struwig. The Peace Parks ICT department also prioritizes vendors that truly understand the value of environmental sustainability and what it’s trying to achieve and, in turn, offer a broad spectrum of scalable solutions that can stand up to the challenge of being deployed in harsh conditions where technology should not necessarily be deployed. “That’s Microsoft,” adds Brider.

Any solution the foundation builds or selects has to improve performance for the people working around the clock on the park grounds. “Through Azure, we give managers and field staff access to real-time information that helps them better plan and report in certain situations. This includes daily updated budgets to allow for better financial planning and pinpoint where financial transactions are in the system, which also allows for better reporting to vendors and consistent on-time deliveries,” explains van der Merwe. “Making managers and field staff’s time on the ground shorter and more productive adds to their efficiency and our effectiveness because we can move on to the next improvement we want to achieve.”

Peace Parks Foundation now uses its Azure environment to streamline planning and prep work within its head office and make conservation efforts more effective and efficient. Tasks like sifting through the massive amounts of data and reporting from the field are time-consuming for workers. One of the departments that’s benefitted most from efforts to consolidate this information is finance, and along with it, the users of financial data. Information is now much more detailed and relevant to managers than it was when financial processing took place in batches. “We’re capturing invoices from our suppliers a lot quicker, and field workers can report back on finances much faster because we’ve given them user-friendly tools with drop-down lists,” says Struwig. Managers have access to their budget versus actual reports on an almost real-time basis as reports are updated each morning with the previous day’s transactions.

The foundation has also introduced commitment accounting. That means once managers place a purchase order or sign a supplier agreement, they can instantly access records to track not just what they’ve spent but also what they’ve committed themselves to. Budgets are captured in the finest detail where required, and expenses are allocated accordingly. This is especially important as some donors are very specific in their reporting requirements, and all donors are entitled to know how their funds are being spent. “We are also able to report at the country, park, and TFCA level to be able to determine and compare costs from one year to the next. This aids us in planning for the future immensely and makes determining our exact financial position so much quicker than was previously possible,” says Struwig.

Analyzing environmental change data and sharing information more securely

Monitoring and evaluation are essential to Peace Parks Foundation’s business, both in the field and its head office. Moving forward, the foundation wanted a unified view of the parks it supports and departments. To better track environmental change and the impact of climate change on human-animal conflict, the foundation is developing a model using Azure and Microsoft Copilot with reporting through Power BI. Business analysts across the foundation, including van der Merwe, work hands on to design custom Power BI reports for this environmental data and for other projects, including budgeting. “When we presented the reports to managers and showed them the information available, they were so thrilled,” says Brider. It will soon use Azure Data Lake to bring together all its information sources and Copilot to mine the data for valuable insights. “We wouldn’t have been able to assist our parks without technology,” adds Brider. “It was never going to work on paper.”

As part of its shift to Azure, foundation leadership also made a conscious decision to strengthen cybersecurity by introducing online backups, sandbox test environments, and other capabilities that it can keep synced and scale as needed. “Moving to Azure made it easier to enhance and grow our environment for whatever we need,” says Brider. It plans to further safeguard its data using row-level and cell-level security from Microsoft Purview.

“The greatest story”

At the outset of its technology journey, Peace Parks Foundation had ideas of what it could do and what it wanted to do. For good reason, Brider says, “Our original plan looked nothing like everything we have now. We unlocked this Azure toolkit, and now we’re seeing all that we can do.” This speaks to the foundation-wide attitude of pushing boundaries, constantly reimagining processes, and being unafraid to try something different.

The foundation now innovates on a daily basis without worrying about the reliability, durability, scalability, or security of its environment. “The true test of our success is that we’re continually evolving and enhancing things, which shows that the business understands our solutions and uses them, not as IT products but as business tools,” says Brider. In fact, discussions with C-suite executives now start with them asking, ‘Can we put it in the cloud?’ “The ability to use this technology to help achieve the Peace Parks Foundation mission is one of the great stories we tell,” concludes Brider.