A team from Eight Tech led by Prof. Jude Lubega (CEO) together with Robert Tumusiime showcased the works ICT4AG Apps of the company in Agriculture to a visiting team from Morocco to the AI Research Center and other members of AIR in Makerere University.

The presentation saw applications like SUFACE which was the first app that we developed in Agriculture launched in late 2013, The app among other things includes a module on farmer profiling, garden mapping over GPS, Open Market for produce and design of knowledge products (Animations) which were integrated in the mobile app to help farmers plan their planting and post harvest handling. More Applications like Cassava Carp on www.cassava-carp.org were showcased, ERIGNU on www.erignu.org, ICOPSEA – Integrating ICT in Commercial Production of Sweet Potatoes in East Africa, www.sweetpotatoeseastafrica.org which project among other things implemented in ICT include, Integrated databases- Farmer profiling, input providers and market database, Garden Mapping – Supports geo-mapping of sites in real-time , Farmer query management and data collection (Text, Audio and Video), Pest and Disease surveillance, Variety identification tool using A1 – ML (Mobile App), Potato disease detection tool (Mobile App), Customer order management… (Mobile and USSD), Stock tracking, Tracking certification and garden inspection among others.

The presentation was successful with attendees applauding our efforts and urging us to add more components so as to bridge the Agriculture Extension Gap between farmers and service providers using ICT. More importantly was the use of Artificial Intelligence in Variety identification and disease detection tool which members found interesting in helping farmers identify the varieties they wish to plant easily and also detect sweet potato diseases fast enough to avoid the poor harvests / yields.