eHealth Africa's CornBot Application Wins Frontier Innovation Award

CAPE TOWN, South Africa - Nov. 15, 2018 - PRLog -- eHealth Africa's (eHA) CornBot application has won the Fall Armyworm Tech Prize award for Frontier Innovations. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Land O'Lakes International Development, and the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research made the announcement at the AfricaCom conference in South Africa today.

Part of the U.S. government's global hunger and food security initiative Feed the Future, the prize was created as  a response to the Fall Armyworm (FAW) outbreak, which first occurred in West Africa in 2016. FAW attacks over 80 different plant species and poses a threat to food supply across the continent. The Fall Armyworm Tech Prize was created to seek digital innovations that could support smallholder farmers through the FAW outbreak in Africa. Out of 228 entries, six organizations were awarded a total of $450,000 for their digital solutions.

eHA received the prize for CornBot, an audio-visual mobile application that interacts with farmers in their local language, talking them through a process to identify, control, and manage FAW. The app was developed in collaboration with the Bullitt Environmental Fellow at Washington State University. CornBot's image-based Q&A mechanism provides farmers with information needed to combat FAW, and also aggregates prevalence data to provide stakeholders with real-time information necessary for formulating evidence-based policies and interventions.

Stephanie Okpere, an Assistant Project Manager in Program Delivery at eHA, explained, "CornBot was built on the concept of holistic pest management that empowers farmers to control Fall Armyworm. We wanted an app that would have a high adoption/usage rate by ensuring the app was available in local languages so that we could speak to people in their language."

More information on eHealth Africa's CornBot application and other eHA software solutions can be found at www.ehealthafrica.org.