Moja’s AI-Assisted Digital Extension Services:
Context & Backstory

Africa needs digital extension services to fill a vast capacity gap. Extension officers are typically faced with impossible workloads. A ratio of one extension officer to 4,000 farmers is typical, and a ratio of one to 10,000 is not unusual. This problem is multifaceted. An army of extension officers large enough to serve Africa’s smallholder farmer population is neither financially nor logistically feasible. A bricks-and-mortar infrastructure large enough to train legions of new extension officers and provide continuing education for existing ones, does not exist. There is no efficient way to provide continuously updated core curriculum to field officers or regional variations based on unique local conditions.

So, in addition to a personnel gap, there is an information delivery gap. New information circulates to officers inefficiently, mostly by analog means, which is typically slow and chronically out of date. A central, digital clearinghouse that aggregates information from universities, NGOs, private and government extension services, and experienced farmers—and makes it broadly available—is what Moja has built and is now piloting. Moja synthesizes agricultural information into a coherent whole and delivers it directly to extension workers and farmers in the field on its platform with a beautiful graphical interface that is easy to use.

Moja is a comprehensive solution. There are many agricultural apps in the marketplace that do one small thing. But becoming a successful farmer requires mastering many small things. Moja is a highly adaptable platform that provides a full range of services for farmers in one place. This allows for a high degree of integration, interactivity, and interoperability. The components of the Moja platform can talk to each other. This empowers Moja to employ AI to analyze and learn important insights about our users. These insights in turn allow us to constantly improve Moja and its offerings to better serve the agricultural community. This isn’t possible with atomized, single-function apps.

The architecture of the Moja platform is endlessly adaptable and scalable. Moja can connect to any outside app or platform with an API or SDK. So, apps that provide information like weather or market prices—literally anything—are easily integrated. Moja can integrate with payment processors, banks, insurance companies, and a whole range of value-added services. But the heart of the Moja platform are its core functions—learning, trading, communicating—in Moja Academy, Moja Marketplace, and Moja Connect. The price of all this functionality is a smartphone. And not everyone has a smartphone—yet. That is changing rapidly. In the meantime, Moja has a solution to that problem too, which we hope to roll our next year (spoiler alert: Moja will provide the phones).

The Moja platform has been built over a period of years at a cost of more than US$3 million. It is fully bespoke and built for Africa. Moja Academy has a state-of-the art, AI-enabled, interactive learning management system (LMS) built on a Moodle 5.0 foundation. Academy also has curriculum for farmers for whom the formal structure of an LMS is not the right fit. A farmer can take classes for free, anytime, 24-7, online or offline at no cost, or enroll in certificate courses for a small fee. Without leaving Moja, a farmer can set up a personal or business storefront in Marketplace to buy, sell, and participate in value chains, while building hubs and communities in Connect. Moja puts knowledge to work with its full range of services.

It makes no sense to gain knowledge and grow crops if you cannot sell your product, form associations, or build value chains and market linkages. Moja’s name is the Swahili word for the number one—a single destination for farmers. This unitary approach has been Moja’s goal since inception. Moja believes that the argument for a unitary approach is far more effective for farmers than a fragmentary one. Why search the internet for a dozen single-function apps when you can download a single one, with everything you need in one place? Building such a solution is difficult, time consuming, and expensive. That being the case, to our knowledge, no one but Moja has even attempted to do it. But Moja is not wishful thinking or vaporware. It is built, tested, and fully operational.

Few, if any, NGOs have the resources, expertise, or will to build a platform like Moja. Although Moja’s founders have extensive experience in the NGO sector, they decided early on that the only viable means to provide a full range of services was with a for-profit model. Moja needed to be self-funding in the long run. Therefore, we did not set out to be a unicorn—a build-and-flip company with high margins from expensive services that no smallholder farmer could afford. We set out to be a camel. Moja is a company with a view to the far horizon, committed to the long road ahead instead of the myopic short road to riches. Camels endure. Moja will make money by charging those who can afford to pay and offering services for free to those who cannot. We are committed to partnerships and cooperative relationships. But Moja is a free agent, unencumbered, and able to pivot quickly and improve constantly in service of its users.