VCCL Ghana: Exploring Generative AI for Food Security in the Sahel

Four countries in the Sahel, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali and Niger are facing severe drought due to climate change. Lake Chad, a source of water for Niger and Chad, 'has shrunk by 90% from 25000 square kms in 1963 to less than 1500 square kilometers in 2001', according to the FAO.

The global food crisis that resulted from the inflationary aftershock of the COVID lockdown as well as from the war in Ukraine, affected the population of those four landlocked countries.

Some of their staple foods are made from cassava. However, their inclusion among the least developed in the world, extreme poverty, as well as intense food insecurity made cassava less affordable for individuals and households.

Cassava is a primary target for food security, food sufficiency and food sovereignty in the Sahel. Yam is another. Cassava is a leading staple crop in sub-Saharan Africa. Yam is a leading staple crop in West Africa.

According to FAOSTAT, Ghana is the third largest producer of cassava and the second highest yam producer in Africa and globally.

For the four countries in the Sahel, their food insufficiency problem presents an opportunity to have cassava and yam become near-surplus across households, against famine, drought, conflicts, infectious diseases, unemployment and poverty.

There are millions of smallholder farmers in Ghana who cultivate cassava and yam. Some of them are beneficiaries of direct and indirect subsidy programs in irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. They also have needs for more subsidies to improve yields. Some have tricycle trucks-buying fuel daily-to transport their co-workers to the farm, bring them back and their harvest. They often lack access to farm machinery and storage.

Some forms of [support and] subsidies are more accessible in some districts of Ghana than in others, indicating a possibility to explore additional incentives to boost cassava and yam production for exports to the Sahel.

Trucks bound for Burkina Faso from Ghana's Tema port, head northward through Ghanaian highways to the Paga border. They are a supply opportunity for Burkina and others.

Village County Company Limited [VCCL] is an agribusiness services and innovation firm in Kumasi, Ashanti Region, Ghana. We are structuring marketplace extensions for farmers in Ghana, as well as reliable sources of cassava and yam for those countries in the Sahel.

The countries have several organizations-affiliated schools in their rural areas. Some organizations provide supplies to those affected by drought. VCCL is aggregating their profiles into a high-quality, noise-error free database, from public pdfs, doc, xls, ppt, html, txt, jpg, png and others.

We are also working on a similar database of available subsidy [and support] programs in Ghana, at districts where they are most abundant, for cassava and yam farmers. Depending on size, we may include farmers of related food crops. We are exploring a model to have pickup of products by trucks heading through Ghana to the Sahel.

The aim is to guarantee a certain amount of cassava and yam supply to regions of those countries, regardless of climate change, conflicts and economic slumps. The vision is to make their markets have a stream of affordable cassava and yam supply, for individuals and households, regardless of income level. This model is expected to generate mass employment for women, as well as youths, to prevent [many of] the thousands of treacherous migration through the Sahara desert towards North Africa to the Mediterranean sea to Europe, every year. Along the line, we expect to extend this model to the entire sub-continent, and elsewhere, with similar situations.

We would apply generative artificial intelligence to subsidy data in Ghana, as well as feeding programs, markets and schools in the countries in the Sahel. Generative AI would make it possible to work in French, spoken in those countries, as well as in English, spoken in Ghana.

We will split the data into training, validation and testing sets. We would model the data with relationships, annotations, variables and constraints, as parameters for contacts of organizations, for subsidy-support-training-programs, for cargo transport, seasons, farmers cooperatives and markets.

Feature columns will include name of school, location, size, name of market, type of market, subsidy category, support organizations, and so on. File formats would be prepared according to filename extensions. Target column would use binary/multi-class classification, forecasting and regression, with hundreds of rows in each and their metrics. Deep learning libraries, Pytorch and MXNet would be used for linear regression, decision trees and convolutional neural networks.

We expect to test the model and use it for batch prediction, for locations, organizations, markets, seasons, farmers and subsidies and so forth, for inferences on how to better approach the workable supply, demand and price equilibrium architecture attuned for food security, starting with cassava and yam, in the Sahel.

We project to launch the model in a few months and have an initial pilot in less than a year, depending on partners and resources available by Q1 '24.

Address: VF12, Grp Road, AE-0490-3155, Ejisu, Kumasi, Ghana.

Email: sahel@vcclafrica.com

Phone: +233 24 965 5788

Website: https://vcclafrica.com/

Village County Company Limited is an agribusiness innovation services firm. We do agritech, agroforestry research and sustainable agriculture development. We provide transport services, supply of agro products, processing of agricultural produce, production research, poultry farming, supply of cereals, data collection and analysis, applied AI in agricultural extension and economics, export of agricultural produce, fish farming, beekeeping, afforestation mapping and supply modeling.

Our vision is food security, sovereignty and sufficiency for sub-Saharan Africa via sustainable agriculture while prioritizing climate mitigation.

We are prospecting modifications to existing systems in agribusiness, to optimize for novel paradigms, towards livelihood and reforestation targets.

This release was published on openPR.