Before we start discussing the future we’ve got to talk about the past. What is the Shamba Oracle? The Shamba Oracle is a geospatial and information technology company based in Kenya that focuses on getting reliable, up-to-date climate, vegetative indices and hazards data from satellite sensors to help use their software and analytics to build decentralized applications relating to climate, ecological and environmental change.

The Shamba Oracle is about making impacts sustainable, accessible and easy to use. All data that is available is usually highly complicated and not readily accessible for developers and other projects all over the world. Hence why, the Shamba Oracle was born.

The concept of using geospatial data to help build real-world applications in the web3 and blockchain ecosystem took a year of in-depth research and development before officially launching in May 2021.

"Shamba is working to support projects in the web3 space working on climate change solutions with the ecological data they need to build scalable products while also working to vertically integrate and deliver impactful solutions as part of the wider ReFi ecosystem." - Kennedy Nganga (founder of the Shamba Oracle)

Shamba Oracle not only do geospatial research on different areas but also has thematic charts and time series graphs where one can visualize datasets on a map, see the spatial detail and how the variables have changed over time.

Funding

During the Gitcoin GR13, the Shamba Oracle was allocated around $70,000USD, which ultimately aided the implementation of their geospatial data projects to help other projects in the ReFi(Regenerative Finance) ecosystem. This allowed the Oracle a chance to improve and upgrade the technical work, which has exponentially increased the amount of data for which to serve the different web3 applications.

GR13 has opened a world of new opportunities by expanding the number of datasets and analytics to those provided by the Shamba oracle.

They now have nearly 60 datasets, with many of these areas having multiple data collections that users can choose from. The medium-term goals of the Shamba oracle are to ultimately grow and create impacts to the point of becoming one of the projects in the ReFi ecosystem.

Increasing these different datasets gives new opportunities for project developers to choose from. The development of new smart contracts which cover different use cases for ecological data was also funded by the GR13.

There are also a lot of new and unique items on the Shamba GitHub account, which features sample smart contracts from zestful NFTs to parametric insurance.

These new tools were created with the idea to show what is possible with examples, as well as the power of ecological data and the impacts it can have all over the world.

Important and large tasks are still being done with the funds that were received, such as the development of mechanistic and ML models.

Statistics

• Team growth expanded by 75% due to the GR13 grant, and now have a solid workforce across the globe. Shamba is still actively looking for recruits to expand and grow its network.
• Datasets grew to almost 60. New features have been added to increase the ability to impact other projects.

The help of GR13 has not gone unnoticed due to the rapid technical development, team expansion and new datasets by Shamba, who is now becoming a thought leader in this space.

There are many ways you can contribute to the company. You can join the team on discord or help them raise funds by supporting them in the GR14. Your participation will mean they can start training new developers on how to use ecological data and build web3 applications whilst creating an unstoppable force of experts who can work with such data and push the next wave of innovation in sustainability. Shamba Oracle’s monthly newsletter is also a great place to keep up with their progress.