Artificial Intelligence Helping African Farmers In The Fight Against Locusts

Posted by: lukwago J in Uganda news January 6, 2021

A free tool that will help farmers and pastoralists across Africa to predict and control locust behaviour has been launched. Kuzi—the Swahili name for the wattled starling, a bird renowned for eating locusts—is an AI-powered tool that generates a real-time heatmap of locusts across Africa. It shows all potential migration routes, and also gives a real-time locust breeding index.

How Kuzi works;

Kuzi uses satellite data, soil sensor data, ground meteorological observation, and machine learning. It uses all these to predict the breeding, occurrence and migration routes of desert locusts across the horn of African and Eastern African countries. It also uses deep learning to identify the formation of locust swarms. Furthermore, Kuzi sends farmers and pastoralists free SMS alerts 2-3 months in advance of when locusts are highly likely to attack farms and livestock in their areas.

However, without preventative measures, a swarm of 80 million locusts can consume food equivalent to that eaten by 35,000 people a day. This can devastate food stocks for vulnerable communities. Putting in place early detection and control measures, critical in desert locust management, will offer farmers and pastoralists a vital tool in the fight against world hunger and food insecurity.

Where can it be used;

Alerts are only currently available for Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, and Uganda. This is all in the regional languages of Kiswahili, Somali and Amharic. Over 200 million people across Eastern Africa speak these languages.

“The first international anti-locust conference was held in Rome in 1931. Yet Africa continues to experience locust invasions almost 100 years later. The worst locust invasion in 70 years occurred in 2020. This threatened food supplies for millions of people across Eastern Africa. Therefore, there has to be a better way to do this, one that has the local communities being central in the fight against locusts,” said John Oroko, CEO of Kuzi’s creator, Selina Wamucii.

“A new wave of locust upsurge now threatens millions across Eastern and Southern Africa, exacerbating food insecurity for already vulnerable communities, amidst the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. We also have a responsibility to develop and deploy locally bred solutions that address these challenges faced by our vulnerable rural communities”. Oroko added.

The free tool is currently available to only users in Somali, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda. There are also plans to roll out to cover the rest of Africa.

Farmers can sign up for the free SMS alerts with any mobile device, with or without an internet connection, capture the GPS location of their farm, and they are good to go, without any charges.

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