Friday, November 10, 2017

Big Data made in Ethiopia

I just arrived in Burkina Faso on a long trip from Nairobi to Addis, then to Lome and finally to Ouagadougou. A long journey on Ethiopian Airline, which is not something i usually look forward to. But this time, i was positively surprised at the level of the in flight magazing Selmata that has a long article on Big Data, a quite astonishing topic for a country that for long was lagging behind in the tech scene.

The article is about Gro Inelligence, a company that i was not aware off, and is funded by Ethiopian (but interestingly with an office in Nairobi)

Gro intelligences addresses the challenge of the information gap in agriculture. From their website they sell themselves as follows : "We built Gro, a data product that enables the discovery and analysis of an unprecedented amount of data in the global agriculture industry. Gro collects and synthesizes trillions of data points from disparate and often times near impossible to use sources, allowing users to paint a clear, comprehensive, and timely picture of the factors influencing the agricultural commodity they are interested in."

Their products are mainly crop focused, there is no livestock related product. And as pointed out in the Selmata magazine, this type of near real time data without validation on the ground still has many issues. Yet it is an interesting player on the ground.

Wanna know more, just read the very well written article in Selmata!