Over the past year, rural farmers in Malawi have been seeking advice about their crops and animals from a generative AI chatbot. These farmers ask questions in Chichewa, their native tongue, and the app, Ulangizi, responds in kind, using conversational language based on information taken from the government’s agricultural manual. “In the past we could wait for days for agriculture extension workers to come and address whatever problems we had on our farms,” Maron Galeta, a Malawian farmer, told Bloomberg. “Just a touch of a button we have all the information we need.”
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The nonprofit behind the app, Opportunity International, hopes to bring similar AI-based solutions to other impoverished communities. In February, Opportunity ran an acceleration incubator for humanitarian workers across the world to pitch AI-based ideas and then develop them alongside mentors from institutions like Microsoft and Amazon. On October 30, Opportunity announced the three winners of this program: free-to-use apps that aim to help African farmers with crop and climate strategy, teachers with lesson planning, and school leaders with administration management. The winners will each receive about $150,000 in funding to pilot the apps in their communities, with the goal of reaching millions of people within two years.
Greg Nelson, the CTO of Opportunity, hopes that the program will show the power of AI to level playing fields for those who previously faced barriers to accessing knowledge and expertise. “Since the mobile phone, this is the biggest democratizing change that we have seen in our lifetime,” he says.
In early February, Opportunity employees from around the world participated in brainstorming sessions for the incubator, generating more than 200 ideas. Many of these employees hoped to wield generative AI’s potential to solve the specific problems of clients they had long worked with on the ground in high-poverty areas. For instance, verbal chatbots offering targeted advice and trained upon specific languages and vetted documents could be especially useful for communities with limited literacy. “Our clients are never going to use Google,” Nelson says. “Now, they can speak, and are spoken to, in their own language.”
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The top 20 teams then worked to transform their ideas into app prototypes, with assistance from mentors at major tech companies and technical support from MIT platforms. The three winners, which do not yet have formal names, were then picked by a panel of judges. The first winner is a farming app that hopes to improve upon Ulangizi. While that app offers general knowledge, this one will be designed to take in personalized data and give specific farming advice—like what seeds to plant and when and how much fertilizer to use—based upon a farmer’s acreage, crop history, and climate.
Rebecca Nakacwa, who is based in Uganda and one of the project’s founders, says that the app’s ability to understand climate patterns in real time is crucial. “When we went to farmers, we thought the biggest problem was around pricing,” she says. “But we were so surprised, because they told us their topmost problem is climate: finding a solution to how to work with the different climate changes. We know that with AI, this is achievable.” She hopes to have the app ready for the start of planting season in Rwanda and Malawi next summer.
The second app helps teachers develop lesson plans tailored to their students. The app is led by Lordina Omanhene-Gyimah, who taught in a rural school in Ghana. She found that teachers faced an acute lack of resources and knowledge about how to cater to classrooms filled with students of different ages and learning styles. Her app allows teachers to input information about student’s learning styles, and then creates lesson plans based on the national school curriculum. Omanhene-Gyimah hopes to roll out the app in classrooms in Ghana and Uganda before the next academic school year.
The third app is designed to help school owners in areas from teacher recruitment to marketing to behavioral management. Anne Njine, a former Kenyan teacher, hopes that the app will be a “partner in the pocket for school leaders, to give them real time solutions and ideas.” Opportunity says that the app is ready to be rolled out to 20,000 schools, potentially reaching 6,000,000 students.
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The success of these apps is far from guaranteed. People in rural areas often lack smartphones or mobile connectivity. (An Opportunity rep says that the apps will be designed to work offline.) There are steep learning curves for new users of AI, and models sometimes return false answers, which can be problematic in educational settings. Nelson hopes that training these AIs on specific data sets and alongside clients will produce better, more accurate results.
Nelson’s goal is for the incubator program to launch three new AI-based apps a year. But that’s dependent on the funding of philanthropists and corporate partners. (Opportunity declined to say how much it has raised for the program so far.)
The founders of the three winning apps are confident that they have found transformative real-life use cases for an industry whose impact is often exaggerated by runaway hype. “It’s not just we like using AI because it’s in vogue and everybody’s doing it,” Omanhene-Gyimah says. “We are in the field. We work with these clients on a daily basis, and we know what they need.”
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