For several years, local small-scale Ghanaian farmers suffered substantial losses due to pest birds that destroy huge hectares of their crops. Cereal farmers specialising in rice, sorghum and millet are particularly bearing the brunt of the losses. Local observers said on average farmers lose 15-20% of their yield to pesky swarm of birds losing in the region of over $80 million per annum.
Warding off birds
In came Mary Aboagye with her aiScarecrow Technologies, an Agritech start-up outfit she co-founded in 2019 to assist the farmers to ward off the destructive birds. On average, farmers spend between eight and ten valuable hours a day trying to deal with these birds from their farms. Through the innovative technology, Aboagye provides a solution that help farmers to reduce the losses caused by the pest birds by 90-95% including enabling them to save considerable amount of their valuable time.
According to Aboagye, the idea of aiScarecrow Technologies came about after a visit to large farm where most farm assistants complained bitterly about the prevalence of pest birds that destroy their fields. They indicated that all their efforts to deal with the problem proved ineffective and that they will welcome any innovative and lasting solutions.
Using children to scare the birds away
Some of the conventional methods they so far tried and which proved futile include physically shouting to drive the birds away, relying on the noise caused by the clanging of metals and by using catapults and a variety of hand-made scarecrows. Aboagye says out of sheer desperation most farmers used their own children to chase the birds at the expense of their education. What her outfit does is to provide a range of reliable, harmless to birds and artificial intelligence driven solutions such as the use of robotic predatory bird. This gives a false sense of the presence of the predatory bird in the vicinity.
She says the solutions does not only help address the problem presented by birds but they also help ensure the children can be allowed to go to school. In addition, and more significantly, the aiScarecrow contributes towards delivering on the Sustainable Development Goals 1,2,4,8 and 13.
Spotting a business opportunity
There and then Aboagye, a shrewd entrepreneur she is, saw this as an inviting opportunity she needed to exploit. She says although she is an environmentalist at heart, she is also a passionate entrepreneur who believes the two are not mutually exclusive. Aboagye says she developed her entrepreneurial interest during her university days where she founded a multi-national organisation called ‘Environmental Change Agents’ comprising of young graduates from some select African countries. “My drive for entrepreneurship got me to seek more training and mentorship hence I enrolled in the 2019 Agritech challenge organised by Kosmos innovation centre,” says Aboagye.
Serial awards winner
But it is her dedication to and promotion of environmental conservation awareness at grassroots level that has earned her plaudits and fame. She received a string of awards and accolades one of which is being enlisted as one of the top 540 women in Africa involved in the Agritech or Agribusiness space.
Other awards she won include:
- winning the KIC Agritech Challenge 2019
- the Ingenuity Cup 2021 and
- the Israeli green innovation competition 2022.
Street ahead of competition
Aboagye has assembled a formidable team of highly qualified youngsters to ensure aiScarecrow Technologies is ahead of the curve. They include Silas Karikari Boateng, an agriculturist with six years in the agricultural space, Bright Tetteh Kwao, a technology enthusiast and physic engineer by training, is the technical lead of the team; Isaac Boakye leads the entity’s operations team and has a background in computer science. Lastly, Boris Boadi, with a background in accounting and finance expert, he is the financial lead of the team.
Rewarding feeling
Aboagye says she aims to expand her outfit as the pest birds hazard is not only confined to Ghana but is prevalent in the entire sub-Saharan region. She says she finds it rewarding to see that her intervention through her start-up has been able to ensure that most children of school going age in her area are now able to pursue their education instead of being deployed farms to chase away birds.
