With support from the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center, this initiative helps farmers and suppliers in food insecure regions feed more people, quickly, with the following guiding tenets.
- Community centered: Local experts make the key decisions, and Kijani-AI provides resources. Expertise, technology, and equipment is shared from farmer to farmer
- Data driven: Providing data trusts and AI innovations will enable countries with hungry populations to increase food yields, expand cultivatable land, and make distribution more efficient.
- Sustainably focused: By incorporating sustainable agriculture and conservation principles into AI- and data-driven systems, Kijani-AI promotes a more efficient, longer lasting, and less wasteful food system.
- Employ high-resolution satellite and drone imaging to capture and share soil conditions and vegetation cover in real time
- Encourage precise application of fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides to minimize waste and maximize environmental sustainability
- Educate on the use of automated tractors and sprayers to increase overall efficiency and productivity
- Ensure small farms reap the benefits of precision agriculture, by motivating large farms to help them by providing technical expertise, sharing equipment and other technical resources
- Develop an open source, precision agricultural data model for farmers in developing countries
- Encourage both small and large farms to have a huge positive impact on the environment – proportionate to their size – by promoting green, sustainable farming practices and developing innovative wildlife conservation techniques
Principles
- Locals lead
Kijani-AI provides resources. It does not make local decisions about farming or food distribution. Local technology experts play a key role in all tech efforts, augmented by international companies, scientists, engineers, and business leaders. - Scale matters
Kijani-AI works top-down while also wanting to empower the edge, focusing on large-scale farms first because these farms can have the greatest immediate impact on food supply. Kijani-AI requires that the farms it supports have a Community Responsibility Program (CRP) where initiatives that share information, expertise and equipment with neighboring farms are favored. - Data drives
Data collection, curation and application is central to Kijani-AI. All data efforts focus on enable farming operations in countries with hungry populations to increase food yields, expand cultivatable land and make food distribution more efficient. - Sensemaking together
Today’s agriculture challenges cannot be met by single farming operations acting alone as we must make sense together across different systems and activities globally. Kijani-AI facilitates the exchange of data, methods resources, and best practices among large-scale farming operations, and ultimately with farming operations of all sizes, according to locally generated trust standards. - Trust builds bridges
Because the latest autonomous tech systems require great stores of data, it is now in the interest of all agricultural operators to pool data—with appropriate trust safeguards—to produce robust, AI-ready data sets. Hunger is not a short-term problem. For arable land to produce food year after year, it must be part of a healthy ecosystem, and must constantly restore its basic elements of soil, water, and organic life. - Sustainability through precision
Data-driven systems, particularly when coupled with AI vision and self-learning, can enable agriculture operations to become much more efficient. Benefits include waste reduction (in many areas); improved weeding and plant thinning; early warnings about pests, disease, weather effects and soil conditions; and improved synchronization between producers and markets.
Tour & team
Mike Davis
Executive Director
Mike is a passionate and entrepreneurial engineer turned business manager with 25 years of broad East African business exposure at every level from board executive to practical hands on implementation.
He was founder and Managing Director of his own start-up in Tanzania and Kenya, which he grew into a $15M company. His skills in team building and leadership, project management, communications and IT systems, allow him to develop and set up business structures in a wide range of sectors. His hard-earned experience of what works and what doesn’t equips him with the commercial reality and risk awareness needed to succeed in these unpredictable times.
Charles Jennings
Chairman, Board of Advisors
Charles is a Senior Fellow with the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center. He is an entrepreneur, writer and speaker. In the 1990s, he founded two tech companies—GeoTrust and TRUSTe—that played a vital role in the development of Internet privacy and security.
Both are still operating today. He is the author of The Hundredth Window: Protecting Your Privacy and Security on the Internet (Simon & Schuster, 2001); and Artificial Intelligence: Rise of the Lightspeed Learners (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).
Daniella Taveau
Board of Advisors
Daniella Taveau is a Senior Fellow with the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center. She is a regulatory and global trade strategist and founder of Bold Text Strategies. She has extensive experience working with senior political officials and advises multinational corporations in six continents on international trade.
Prior to starting her own firm, Daniella was an International Trade Negotiator with the US Environmental Protection Agency where she represented the United States at the World Trade Organization; all US Free Trade Agreements including the Transpacific Partnership, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, and the US Korea Free Trade Agreement; the UN Food and Agriculture Organization; and the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation.
Deon Haigh
Board of Directors
Deon is a business leader who has successfully implemented a greenfield operation in Uganda from startup to fully performing multinational company, supporting 20,000 small-scale farmers.
He was born in Africa and has lived in Zimbabwe, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda. He has fourteen years experience in executive roles in agribusiness in Southern and East Africa. These roles were with Fortune 500 companies with business models based on agriculture while maintaining core values around sustainability and viability from field to consumer. Deon firmly believes in working alongside local communities to develop their expertise and capabilities with the goal of enhancing sustainable food production in the region.
Shela Davis
Project Manager
Shela Davis is an educator and administrator who has used her personal and career experiences to develop strong interpersonal, organizational, and problem-solving skills.
She believes technology can play a major role in creating more equitable and sustainable opportunities in education and development . Shela mixes passion, creativity, and energy with a strong work ethic. Shela received her education at the University of Cambridge with a BA in Natural Sciences. She holds a Master’s degree in Engineering for Development from the University of Southampton and her PGCE (International) from the University of Nottingham. Shela founded a successful business teaching movement and music classes to young children and has directed, produced, and choreographed numerous theater productions. She has an Associate Diploma in Performing Arts from Stagecoach (UK). Shela was born and brought up in Kenya where she currently lives with her husband and three children.
Bob Ondhowe
Board of Directors
Robert is a sustainable development expert with over twenty-five years’ experience with development agencies, the United Nations, private sector, and civil society.
A graduate in agriculture, environmental science, and environmental law, Robert has worked in projects located in five different continents covering areas as diverse as climate smart agriculture, public policy and law, renewable energy, biodiversity, and general conservation. He is passionate about the improvement of livelihoods through the capacitation of small to medium enterprises through the use of innovative technologies and a broadening of horizons. Robert has extensive contacts with multilateral development agencies and governments in countries across the continents.
The GeoTech Center champions positive paths forward that societies can pursue to ensure new technologies and data empower people, prosperity, and peace.