I'm building KamataShamba – an AI agricultural platform accessible via USSD on any basic phone.

The Problem

Kenyan smallholder farmers:

Lose 30-50% of potential income

Have no weather/pest alerts

Sell to middlemen at 50% below market

Can't access credit (no formal history)

60%+ use basic phones only

The Solution

Feature How Channel

Weather forecast AI + satellite USSD

Pest detection Image recognition WhatsApp

Marketplace Farmer → buyer direct USSD + Web

Credit scoring Platform activity Automatic

Loans/Insurance Partner integration USSD

The Stack

yaml

Channels:

USSD: Africa's Talking API

WhatsApp: Twilio/Meta

Mobile (future): Flutter

Web (buyers/admin): React

Backend:

API: Python/FastAPI

Cache/Queue: Redis

Primary DB: PostgreSQL

Time-series: TimescaleDB

ML:

Pest detection: TensorFlow (CNN)

Weather forecast: TensorFlow (LSTM)

Credit scoring: Scikit-learn

Infrastructure:

Cloud: AWS (EKS, RDS, S3)

Container: Docker

Payments:

M-Pesa API (C2B/B2C + escrow)

Questions for the…