PxD Joins Effort to Bring AI-Powered Forecasting to 100 Million Smallholder Farmers

Precision Development (PxD) is joining a new effort to expand access to AI-powered weather and crop disease forecasting for smallholder farmers across South and Southeast Asia and East Africa. Over the next three years, the initiative, with support from the OpenAI Foundation, aims to reach 100 million farmers with more timely, localized weather information.

Smallholder farmers grow a third of the world’s food, yet many still lack access to the information they need to make critical decisions about planting, harvesting, and protecting their crops. Dry spells, unseasonal rainfall, and disease outbreaks can wipe out a season’s harvest, and climate change is making these risks harder to predict.

As part of this effort, PxD will work with governments and civil society organizations to deliver AI-enabled forecasts and the advice built on them directly to farmers. By embedding these services in public systems, and working across a network of dissemination partners, PxD will reach farmers at national scale, in their own language, through channels they already use. 

The initiative also includes the University of Chicago, UC Berkeley, CIMMYT, Digital Green, and AIM for Scale, each contributing to a different part of the chain from forecasting to national financing. 

Together, we hope to bring decision-relevant weather information within reach of 100 million farmers over the next three years, helping them improve farm productivity, reduce crop losses and boost their incomes.

Contact: Sara Godfrey — sgodfrey@precisiondev.org