Q: What was the problem the partnership wanted to solve for African farmers?
A: We set out to increase the efficiency and reach of agricultural finance in Uganda. The problem is not a lack of capital, but not enough knowledge about climate adaptation measures in farming. Deep, local knowledge of each farmer and the productivity of their land and efforts does not exist, making it difficult to know which farmers could benefit from credit and loan facilities.
We provided essential information and better communication between farmers’ service agents, while avoiding deforestation and biodiversity loss, to deliver a more responsible production of cash crops using better communication between farmers’ service agents.
Q. How did the partnership help create the solution?
A: The partnership enabled the merging of capabilities as the solution. Rather than change the process, we used technology to supercharge it, processing more spatial data than banks and their available resources. Opportunity International, who had ownership to the problem, provided on-the-ground analysis. The European Space Agency had available funding to de-risk the project, and gave access to satellite imagery for further analytics. Sensonomic had the geospatial and observational data analytics and in-house software development expertise.
Q. How important are partnerships in solving complex problems, like those in agriculture?
A: Technology’s role makes connections easier, and knowledge and finance more easily accessible. But technology cannot exist in a vacuum, and partners who know and live with the problems are essential in attempting to solve any problem worth solving. Our project relied on automated and supervised AI for creating and engineering satellite imagery for time-series analysis. Human intelligence provided the balance, as the output would have had little value without the context provided by the people on the ground in Uganda.