Fighting the Cocoa Black Pod Disease with Drone Technology in Ghana

According to the 2012 Ghana Cocoa Board report, the nation lost $230 million and more than 200,000 tons of cocoa, representing 25% of the annual output, due to the black pod disease. Rainfall, high relative humidity, and low temperature are known to create favourable humid conditions for the disease — and if left untreated, it can destroy all yields. Annually, the black pod disease pathogen can cause a loss of up to 10% of total trees and a yield loss of up to one-third. It’s reported to cause an average annual pod loss of about 40% in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire (N’Guessan, 2013). The disease poses a significant threat to the sustainability of Ghana’s cocoa industry — one of the world’s largest exporters—and its economy as a whole.

(Emmanuel Nyatefe, Diana Rashid, and Success Awuku-Amador – Founders of PeculiarAI)

To combat this situation, three Mastercard Foundation Scholars from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana — Emmanuel Nyatefe, Success Awuku-Amador, and Diana Rashid — came up with PeculiarAI, an artificial intelligence drone technology designed for the early detection of the cocoa black pod disease via a mobile application with a GPS location system.

“What we hope to achieve with PeculiarAI is to use artificial intelligence to solve challenges and problems in Ghana’s agriculture industry. Still, it has become necessary to start with the problem of black pod diseases due to the importance of cocoa to Ghana’s economic fortunes as it generates $1.61 billion annually from the export of cocoa,” Emmanuel Nyatefe, the lead for PeculiarAI, explained.

“With the black pod disease, it is difficult to locate infected cocoa trees, especially on large-scale cocoa farms, but with PeculiarAI’s technology, farmers can detect and separate black-pod-infected trees with the aid of their mobile phones. This saves them time, prevents pre-harvest losses, and improves their overall agricultural efficiency.”

Emmanuel and his team won the Resolution Project Social Venture Challenge at the 2021 Mastercard Foundation Baobab Summit. The challenge is a collaboration between the Mastercard Foundation and The Resolution Project to provide entrepreneurial and socially responsible Scholars with a pathway to bolster their social enterprises and deepen community impact. Winners of the Resolution Project Social Venture have access to grant money and business support to refine their business models and products.

“Winning The Resolution Project Social Venture Challenge was a great step towards greatness. We were excited that someone believed in our ideas, and we cannot wait to make a huge impact. We will strive to get the product to work perfectly and deployed into the market to get the work done,” Success Awuku-Amador, the co-founder of PeculiarAI, shared.

The most important aspect for the team was to get funded—which the Mastercard Foundation provided through the Resolution Project.

“As the project is still at the development stage, we need these funds to conduct product development and market research, and also to expand our production capacity. We are very grateful to the Mastercard Foundation, the Resolution Project, our advisor, and all other Mastercard Foundation Scholars who reached out to provide tangible and intangible support,” Diana Rashid, co-founder of PeculiarAI, added.

“In five years’ time, our vision is to make the brand of PeculiarAI fully known to the Ghanaian [populace] and the African continent. We also envision selling close to 5000 of our products to our consumers and having a projected revenue of $1.5 million by the end of those five years.”

Learn more about the Social Venture Challenge.