Agriculture

Mamadou Alpha Diallo of Cheikh Anta Diop University in Senegal will apply Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve decision-making, policy development, resource allocation and communication to help combat infectious diseases in Africa. They will use ChatGPT-4 to analyze and interpret epidemiological data, clinical records, and research literature to help predict outbreaks, identify priority areas for interventions, and evaluate the potential impacts of specific policies.

Sophie Pascoe of Wits Health Consortium (Pty) Limited in South Africa, with support from the organizations, AUDERE in the U.S. and the Centre for HIV and AIDS Prevention Studies (CHAPS) in South Africa, will develop a Large Language Model (LLM)-based application, Your Choice, that interacts with individuals in a human-like way to respectfully obtain their sexual history and improve the accuracy of HIV risk assessments to control the epidemic in South Africa.

Darlington Akogo of MinoHealth AI Labs in Ghana will leverage a multimodal Large Language Model (LLM) to generate accurate and comprehensive medical reports based on the analysis of medical images to reduce the need for manual reports and enhance diagnostic capabilities for radiologists and clinicians. African healthcare systems have excessively high patient-to-doctor ratios and prevalent diseases and severely inadequate numbers of radiologists.

Theofrida Maginga of the Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania will develop a ChatGPT-powered Swahili chatbot for smallholder farmers with limited literacy and scarce resources in Tanzania to detect crop diseases quickly and easily. Maize is one of the most important crops in Tanzania and generates up to 50% of rural cash income. Several diseases that afflict maize are hard to detect visually, leading to substantial losses in crop productivity and income.

Firat Guder and Tony Cass of Imperial College London in the United Kingdom along with George Mahuku and James Legg at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Tanzania are developing a low-cost, disposable electrochemical lateral flow assay for smartphones to rapidly detect crop viruses in the field and enable broad crop disease surveillance in low-income regions. Most diagnostic tests are laboratory-based, expensive, and slow.

Julius Lucks of Northwestern University in the U.S. is developing a low-cost field test that can detect multiple plant pathogens and produce simple visual outputs for farmers in low-income countries to better monitor their crops. Current diagnostic field tests only detect one disease and are generally costly and difficult to use. In Phase I, they developed a sensitive, multiplexed assay that can detect multiple pathogens using biosensors and produce colorimetric outputs, and performed successful field-testing in several countries.

The Yukon soaps company has a vision to grow and create greater impact in the community of Mayo. There is a lack of physical space for people to grow their own ideas for plant and natural product development. Women in the community need safe spaces to be creative, develop skills and build their micro business ideas. Few opportunities exist for makers and creators to share and learn knowledge related to plants, harvesting and healing the spirit in a regenerative way.

Issues surrounding Indigenous seed sovereignty in Canada can be sourced to two key problems: seed health and access, and seed stewardship education. Currently, four corporations control 60% of the world’s seed sales, and 95% of corporate seeds grown are bred with the heavy use of industrial fertilizers and insecticides. This has impacted seeds’ preparedness for climate change as well as their nutritional content, as many crops have lost 30-100% of their vitamin content compared with 60 years ago.

For the last decade, Somalia has suffered from one of the highest rates of emergency-level malnutrition. Lack of timely, reliable nutrition and mortality data prevents humanitarian actors from responding appropriately in time; there is shortage in skilled surveyors and data collection is biased, costly, slow and lacks transparency. SMARTplus is a digital infrastructure generating accurate data with less resources (staff/time), to ensure malnourished children receive life-saving health services.

Post-harvest losses for fruits and vegetables in refugee regions of Kenya are as high as 60% for some fresh produce since the cold‐storage chain is virtually non‐existent due to the high cost of equipment and spotty electricity. Because fresh produce and vaccines can perish in a matter of days under ambient temperatures, temperature control alone can extend the shelf life by weeks or even months.