Tackling wildlife crime one dashboard at a time…
The illegal wildlife trade is a multi-billion-dollar international trade supported by organised crime networks that involve the illegal poaching, smuggling, and selling of wild animals, plants, and their derivates along with associated money laundering. It is recognised by Interpol and the UN as the fourth largest illicit trade in the world[1].
Despite the scale of illegal wildlife trade, its investigation is often led by non-governmental organisations (NGO), such as the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), who use open-source data and undercover operations to expose wildlife crime and environmental abuse worldwide. Applying Principle One’s skills and expertise felt like an interesting challenge for this year’s summer intern programme, where we pair our student interns with our own subject matter experts to deliver pro bono projects.
After a fast-paced introduction to key consulting principles and data analytics, (left to right) Alice (UCL, Engineering and Public Policy), Greta (Imperial, Chemistry) and Will (Lancaster, Computer Science), were keen to get stuck in.
The ten-week project focused on EIA’s Media Monitoring Programme which uses open-source data, to collate names of individuals and organisations reported in media to be linked to environmental crime. These profiles are then shared with banks and risk-compliance services to strengthen Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) due diligence checks and thereby deny financial services to those profiting from wildlife crime. These financial institutions provide anonymised feedback to EIA on the impact of the data they receive; a truly collaborative process.
One of the first lessons the team learnt was that NGOs typically work with limited financial and technical resources, meaning many processes remain manual and only evolve slowly due to limited budget for technological solutions. Maintaining a focus on day-to-day operations means that there is little time to think about how to apply innovative technologies. Significant staff resources are spent on data entry and manual transfer, rather than creating opportunities to analyse, identify and communicate emerging risks. Our initial discovery work identified scope to automate two manual processes: collecting feedback from financial institutions into a dashboard for analysis, and automation of collecting open-source data into their internal data storage system.
As EIA had no automated way to collate and report feedback from financial institutions (FIs) to partners, donors and across its own staff, the idea of developing a series of automated data pipelines to populate a central Management Information Dashboard for all data contributors was proposed.
There were a number of challenges to overcome in terms of building what initially seemed like a simple answer to the problem. Feedback comes from three different sources, each in a different format and at different intervals. This needed an automated process to manage this data, recognising that there was limited technical support in place to troubleshoot issues with the ingest process. Power Automate provided a solution using existing software, enabling an interactive Power BI dashboard to be developed (shown below populated with synthetic data), reviewed and refined to deliver something that was intuitive and easy to use for EIA staff.
Populated with Synthetic Data
This first project served as a warm-up, the team build their relationship with their client, learnt the importance of showing examples, getting feedback and being prepared to deliver something that would be “even better if….”. They also learnt about having to work with the dependencies of their client and how to plan accordingly to manage delays and approval processes.
With this delivery successfully achieved and contributing clear value, EIA was confident to give a second, more complicated and less well-defined problem for the team to take on. This challenge was managing data ingestion from a partner organisation, a time-consuming manual task, where there was a considerable data backlog.
The data was challenging, with duplicate records and validation required before it could be added to the EIAs own data storage system. The partner’s data was extracted into a Microsoft List before being sent through a Power App to allow for user-friendly duplicate checking, then validation and submission of the required records. This delivered a streamlined automated data ingestion process, with manual input only required by exception rather than across the entire data entry process. The successful implementation of these automations creates bandwidth for EIA’s analysts to shift focus from data wrangling to finding trends and patterns in illegal wildlife trade enabling proactive action by EIA and partners.
Populated with Synthetic Data
In addition, the interns completed a comprehensive report outlining opportunities around how EIA’s end to end data acquisition, entry, and storage capabilities could be facilitated by applying Artificial Intelligence.
Working collaboratively with the EIA across both projects provided valuable insight into working with real clients and the core aspects within the wildlife crime sector, particularly the relationship between NGOs, financial intelligence and how data is distributed to third parties. It also highlighted the benefits of an Agile work environment, with the breakdown of work into sprints and delivery of early prototypes enabling the team to receive internal and client feedback on a regular basis for iterative improvements.
Principle One would like to thank EIA and Shaliza Malik, Data and Research Officer for all their support over the summer and look forward to maintaining the relationship longer term: “Alice, Greta and Will made a valuable contribution to EIA’s work over the summer, delivering practical solutions, within a very limited time frame, that have helped us improve the way we manage and use our data. Their ability to quickly understand our processes and translate our requirements into effective tools, whilst also thinking broader and longer term in the recommendations they provided was particularly impressive.”
Over the course of the internship, Alice, Greta and Will have developed insight into the challenges faced by EIA and its partners, helping tackle the data problems that are faced by so many of Principle One’s customers and pushing themselves to achieve far more than our customers or they themselves expected. This ten-week introduction has let them develop experience of consulting, an appetite for supporting our customers in law enforcement and the wider public sector and we look forward to welcoming them back as part of our graduate intake in 2027.
If you are interested in applying for an internship or a graduate role at Principle One, please send us a CV and cover letter outlining your interest to careers@principleone.co.uk.
To find out more about the Environmental Investigation Agency and their work in tackling wildlife crime, click here.
[1] United Nations Environment Programme, & INTERPOL. (2016). The rise of environmental crime: A growing threat to natural resources peace, development and security – A UNEP–INTERPOL rapid response assessment.
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