Climate change problems that affect different communities differently, exacerbate trust levels in a context of diminishing resources, and point to the potential of collective intelligence to point to synergies instead of trade-offs.  Bringing together herders, farmers, and county government officials at several points during the design and prototyping process, allowed groups to openly discuss differences where dialogue and data might reduce tensions related to scarcity and climate adaptation in the future.   Involving community data scout network from the outset and co-designing the data collection process helped overcome some of the existing tensions over resources. The prototype of the collaborative platform was successful in the way it mobilized tacit knowledge of the area’s water points to plug a pervasive data gap. For example, when looking at water quality, this initiative unearthed local practices whereby households treat it with plant extracts from indigenous trees. The Kenya Water Institute is now validating the efficacy of this method as a sustainable non-toxic alternative to chemical coagulants. 

By co-designing the initiative with one of the academia partners, the Kenya Water Institute, they were able to pick up a local solution to water purification surfaced by the data scouts and are now validating the efficacy of this method as a sustainable non-toxic alternative to chemical coagulants.  Working with local scouts led to faster data collection because of their good knowledge of the local area. This in turn, has generated interest of county governments in mobilizing community networks to collect data on issues beyond water infrastructure, for example, supporting a planned livestock census. UNDP's Environment and Resilient Unit adopted the same model and used the data scouts to undertake energy mapping in the county.