I attend more than my fair share of events every year, but my favorite is the Global Citizen Festival in New York City. For those not familiar with it, it’s an international education and advocacy organization dedicated to ending extreme poverty and its system causes. The goal of Global Citizen is to end extreme poverty by 2030.

The Global Citizen Festival is an annual music festival and advocacy event put together by the organization to drive policies and financial commitments from work leaders, corporations and philanthropists towards the overall goal. The event draws more than 60,000 people to address poverty, sustainability and education around the world. This year the event created a record-breaking 4.3 million actions to protect the Amazon, secure clean energy for homes in Africa and support children’s education worldwide.

Each year, in partnership with Global Citizen, Cisco Systems Inc. recognizes young people for making a positive impact with the Cisco Youth Leadership Award. The winners receive $250,000 toward their efforts of ending extreme poverty. I had the privilege of interviewing this year’s award recipient Esther Kimani (pictured), founder of Farmer Lifeline Technologies.

Kimani grew up in a Kenyan farming village. Her family, like many others, would lose a third or nearly half of their crops to pests and disease. Kimani was the only girl from her village to attend a university, where she studied math and computer science and wanted to apply her knowledge to help farmers back home. She came up with the idea of using AI-enabled cameras to monitor crops and alert farmers to pest and disease outbreaks. That’s how Farmer Lifeline Technologies was created.

The tool uses cameras to track fields and sends farmers a text message when it detects signs of pests or disease. The alerts go out in the farmer’s local language and suggest what action they should take. Compared with existing options like drones or lab testing, Farmer Lifeline Technologies is only a few dollars per month and can cover several farms at once. Kimani explained that drones can cost up to $100 an hour and private labs charge about $60 per test, which is unaffordable for small farmers, many of whom struggle to make that much in day.

If things don’t change, local farmers in Africa face devastating crop loss, up 70% of the food produced, according to Kimani. That wasted food could feed more than a billion people. Kimani believes that cutting these losses is just as important as trying to grow more food. It could create new opportunities for young people in agriculture, in addition to making a major difference for women in farming.

“Women carry the weight of both farming and family because they provide more than 50% of the labor force in these rural farming communities,” she said. “We thought about a technology that would serve them, so that when they’re still working in their homes, they can get a notification. They don’t have to be on the farm. An SMS is enough for them to take action and save their crops while there’s still time.”

Developing Farmer Lifeline Technologies required a lot time and sacrifice. Kimani had to tap into her personal savings to support her team in the beginning. Training the AI models was also a long process that involved sorting data and improving accuracy for different crops. Refining the tool took several years.

The tool has matured since its inception in 2020. It’s now integrated with a global database application programming interface, which helps identify pests and diseases across thousands of crop species in different regions. Although Farmer Lifeline Technologies currently operates in Kenya, with Cisco’s backing, Kimani hopes to expand into the East African region as well.

“Whether a camera is mounted in a New York apple farm, in the Philippines, in East Africa or in Kenya, it will still work the same because of the global database API,” said Kimani. “And we are taking tremendous steps towards our intellectual property. We’ve filed for an African one and are pursuing a global patent as well.”

Today, Kimani and her team are no longer limited to pretrained models. They’re building their own, which means better accuracy and more opportunities to scale. The team is also working to extend the reach of each camera unit, so it can scan more farmland. At the moment, one camera can cover about four to five farmers. Kimani plans to expand that to nearly 30 farmers per unit in the future.

The goal is to reach 1 million farmers by 2030. Compared with the 7 million small farmers in Kenya, 33 million across Africa and 500 million across the global south, “1 million is a drop in the ocean,” according to Kimani. Still, she believes this milestone is just the beginning.

She said winning the award has been “mind-blowing” and gives her company access not only to funding, but also to mentorship and technical support from Cisco engineers. As an example, the models currently run on a laptop and can take weeks to run. Kimani is working with Cisco to better understand compute options than can speed up the processing time.   

Solving this problem will have a greater impact than just producing more food. “In Kenya, farmers are putting in the work and with the right support, they can produce enough food to feed themselves and grow the economy,” Kimani said. “Farming has the potential to absorb more youth, many of which are unemployed.”

When asked what advice Kimani has for other young entrepreneurs, she said: “To these young people who have problem-solving minds, let’s not be afraid to step out there. It starts as an idea, but you need to make the first move. It will be bold. Some of us are called crazy, and we get hard slaps on our entrepreneurship journey. But at the end of the day, the impact that we make will fuel us to continue doing what we do.”

On a related note, at the event, I ran into the first Cisco Youth Leadership Award winner, Wawira Njiru, founder and CEO of Food4Education. Her company uses IoT and mobile technology to simplify the process of kids being able to purchase subsidized lunches at school. When I first met her, in 2019, Food4Education was being used to feed about 3,000 kids per day. Since winning the award, she has scaled the company up and is now feeding more than 600,000 per day.

Kimani’s success and recognition through the award should be a reminder to all that one person can indeed make a difference. Hopefully her story, along with previous award winners, such as Njiru, will inspire other young people with an idea to be bold, take that thought and put it into action.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE

Photos: Zeus Kerravala