USSD interface for farmers
Agricultural officer dashboard
Home page
Admin dashboard
Transport provider dashboard

ChapFarm: AI-Powered Farming via USSD**

💡 Inspiration

The spark for ChapFarm came from my grandmother, a smallholder farmer in rural Kabale, Uganda. For decades, she relied on her intimate knowledge of the seasons — knowing when the March rains would arrive or when to plant her beans and maize. But climate change has disrupted this rhythm.

In Uganda, where 70% of the population depends on agriculture (World Bank, 2022), unpredictable weather has led to devastating crop losses. In 2023, flash floods in Katakwi destroyed 60% of sorghum crops, while late rains in Kabale delayed planting by a month (FAO Uganda, 2023). Meanwhile, pests like the fall armyworm, worsened by warmer temperatures, ravaged 40% of maize yields in northern Uganda in 2024 (MAAIF).

The pattern is heartbreaking:

🌧️ Unpredictable rains flood or parch fields
🐛 Pests and diseases surge without warning
💔 Crops fail, wiping out livelihoods
🤷🏾‍♀️ Farmers lack timely, localized advice

My grandmother had no access to real-time weather forecasts or expert guidance. With only 15% of Ugandan farmers reached by extension services (UBOS, 2023), and over 70% owning basic feature phones (UCC, 2023), I envisioned ChapFarm:

An AI-powered, USSD-based platform delivering instant, localized agricultural advice to farmers on any phone — no internet required.

🌍 What It Does

ChapFarm is a low-bandwidth, high-impact agricultural assistant that works on basic phones through a simple USSD code. It allows rural farmers to:

📥 Ask farming-related questions and receive smart, AI-generated responses
🌦️ Get localized weather warnings and agricultural alerts from authorities
🐞 Report problems like crop diseases, flooding, and pests
📡 Access the service without needing internet or a smartphone
🛠️ Help government officials track field issues and respond faster

Admins and agricultural officers use a web dashboard to monitor farmer reports, send mass alerts, and manage the system.

🔧 How We Built It

Backend

FastAPI: Powered the API and backend logic with modular, clean code
SQLModel + MySQL: Managed user data, reports, alerts, and AI responses
Africa's Talking USSD API: Let us build seamless menu flows for feature phones
JWT Auth: Secured user roles for farmers, authorities, and admins
AWS Bedrock (Titan Model): Handled AI generation of concise agricultural advice
Fuzzy Matching: Reduced repeated AI calls by caching similar past queries

Frontend

React + TypeScript: Built a modern dashboard for authorities to track reports and alerts

😅 Challenges We Ran Into

USSD Limitations: Designing powerful features with a 160-character SMS mindset required lots of iteration
Localized AI Prompts: Tuning AI to respond in familiar phrasing for rural Ugandan farmers took creativity
Role-Based Access: Balancing simplicity with admin control across multiple roles (farmer, transport, authority)
Low Internet Regions: We had to ensure the system was usable even with minimal data access for authorities

🏆 Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

Deployed an AI system that rural farmers can access using feature phones
Successfully integrated AWS Bedrock for low-cost, contextual advice generation
Built a clean, effective admin dashboard
Created an architecture that could be replicated across other African regions
Made farmers feel seen and supported, even in hard-to-reach areas

📚 What We Learned

How to integrate AI tools like Bedrock into lean, real-world platforms
That user empathy — especially for low-tech users — is everything
How USSD can still be incredibly powerful with the right design
Real change doesn’t always need fancy apps — sometimes, it’s just one short code away