About

Problem Statement · Impact Opportunities

Nearly half of Nigerians live in rural areas where their primary occupation is farming. Farmers walk through several hectares, multiple times weekly, looking for crops that are stressed or diseased. This is not an easy thing to do and discourages a lot of young people from this vital economic activity. When such fault is identified, the farmer relies on the more experienced colleagues for advice on what to do or PREFERRABLE wait for a government extension staff to show up at the village.

Today, these extension staff don’t show up in many villages anymore; and when they do, the service is inadequate. As a result, millions of farmers are not able to access quality advice as well as the latest, authentic information on best farming practices leading to their inability to improve yield, manage pest attack & stubborn weeds (largely due to climate change), and access premium market for their harvest.

1
Timely, location-based, personalized advice on
- Soil nutrient distribution, with the fertilizer application.
- Selecting the right, highly resistant seed.
- How the crop is doing (health-wise).
- Surface water and its stress level on crop.
- Projected crop yield at harvest time.
2

Managing pest attacks

Lack of a cloud-based feedback mechanism that monitors pest population in realtime, and then provides early warning on how to mitigate the attack.
3

Intrusion & theft

Many forms of mediation (and force) have failed to resolve cattle intrusion on farm leading to destruction of crops that sometimes precipitates into violent clash between farmers and cattle herders

Our Solution

An e-Extension software, named Capture, that uses remote sensing tech to provide “near” realtime, data-driven and personalized advisory & extension service to farmers remotely via SMS, robocall or in-person via a Village Agent. Capture generates automated advice that can cater to the needs of millions of smallholder farmers simultaneously and remotely (without human human intervention) in their respective local language, regardless of where they are geographically located. This is similar to telemedicine.

Manage soil nutrient

Create intelligent fertility maps to plan precision flight by drones to fix nutrient defects.

Crop health alert

Farmer gets near realtime SMS alert or phone call on crop health in their local language.

Mitigate pest attack

An IoT rig that collects pest population data, generate early warning and pesticide advice.

Crop yield prediction

Get a data-driven, personalized risk report for a farm/crop; specially useful for investors.

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG-1 No Poverty

80% of people living below poverty line are in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, half of them are under the age of 18. Some 70% of Nigerians live in poverty and it is especially severe in rural areas, where up to 80 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line, and social services and infrastructure are limited. The country's poor rural women and men depend on agriculture for food and income, but yield is not improving until now. Solving this challenge through precision agriculture is our mandate.

SDG-2 Zero Hunger

When rural farmers are able to produce more per hectare (using our affordable precision agriculture tools), they not only have enough food to eat but also disposable produce to sell and support other family needs. Farming is the largest economic driver in villages. Poverty among farmers is as a result of their inability to increase yield/ha, productivity. Most tips on how to improve yield come in trickles, are generalized, delivery of such tips is not sustained, and have minimal technology enablers for scalability.

SDG-8 Decent work

Many young people don't consider farming a decent work; this is because farming hitherto is very manual and hardly make use of tech to increase efficiency. We want to change it all with Capture, a mobile app that enable anyone starts and manages a farm digitally from a mobile phone. This will be attractive young people (especially especially women) and the tech-savvy urban dwellers; pulling them into the rural economy. This will result in new capital injection into our villages as well as accelerating knowledge transfer and all-round economic growth.