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A recipient of the inaugural Maxis Awards, Dzaeman Dzulkifli is working to build a digital platform to facilitate how his organisation can raise awareness and funds, and track its forest conservation efforts
The rainforests are in good hands with Dzaeman Dzulkifli. His organisation the Tropical Rainforest Conservation and Research Centre (TRCRC), which he founded in 2012, addresses the loss of biodiversity in Malaysia by preserving rare and endangered local tree and plant species, and by leading reforestation projects across the country.
“We’re focused on forest restoration at our core,” he says. “We guard endangered trees and develop sustainable tree management systems for Malaysia. Recently, we have also been working regionally—we have a Southeast Asia-wide presence, in every country except Singapore and Brunei.”
Now, thanks to his win in the Maxis Awards, TRCRC is planning to take that mission to the next level with an efficiency-boosting technological upgrade. The inaugural Maxis Awards support entrepreneurs from the Gen.T community who are harnessing digital tools to bring about meaningful social impact within their community. The winners were selected according to their economic, social or environmental impact, innovation, use of technology and ability to generate quantifiable results.
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Dzaeman says that his organisation decided to enter the awards because they provided a potential opportunity to develop technologies that it was already thinking about, but had been unable to implement. In particular, it is looking to develop software that will allow it to digitise its entire tree management process, from procurement to planting. TRCRC allocates grant funding to individual projects but lacks a centralised platform that would allow it to both acquire donors and keep track of projects, which would provide much-needed transparency and make it easier to attract funds.
“We want to ensure that we’re planting the correct tree from the correct sources at the correct points. And we want to make this process a lot smoother. As we do that, we can come up with ways of generating more transparency and more funds. The key is making sure that we have the correct data.”
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With some help from Maxis' eCommerce and retail solutions, TRCRC will be able to create an online marketplace. There, it can list trees on its project sites that corporates and the public can pledge to adopt and finance. “With this new solution, fundraising will be made more streamlined and automated for us. This will enable us to accept more pledges for our various projects while allowing us to focus on carrying out the conservation work in the field. At the same time, we can reach a larger audience and increase our fundraising capability.”
“Every single forest will have a unique composition of trees,” he explains. “When you select a site, you want to restore it using select species from the region as much as possible. We want to restore forests to the most diverse level possible, and that level is about 300 to 400 different trees per hectare. You need a whole network of sources of trees. As we train more people, not everybody has a GPS system, not everybody has a computer they can type in all the information and keep track of what they have and where they got it from. If we are able to develop this app, we can geotag the source of the tree or the parent tree. We can then build the momentum of our projects a lot faster.
“At the end of the day, we are limited by the funds available to us. If we can streamline our method of collection, we can then scale up the work that we do in the field.”
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