Ndemri: Artificial Intelligence Serving the Fields of the Sahel

The platform, developed by the Cameroonian startup Maroua Innovation Technology, operates on a simple principle: farmers take photos of their crops with their phones, and the system analyzes the images to identify diseases, assess soil conditions, recommend the crops best suited to the plot, and offer personalized advice. No middlemen, no travel, no waiting. The response comes directly, in accessible language, designed for users who may not have technical training.

What sets Ndemri apart from a generic solution is the data it is built on. The artificial intelligence models are trained on data collected in the Sahel region: local crops, regional diseases, and climatic conditions in the Far North. A model calibrated using European or American databases would not recognize a cowpea disease in Maroua. Ndemri, on the other hand, was designed for exactly that.

A Solution That Creates Value

Behind the platform is a team of five engineers and researchers founded in October 2023. Dr. Touza Isaac, who holds a Ph.D. in computer science and specializes in AI, leads the vision and architecture of the models. Sali Emmanuel, a data science engineer, serves as technical director. The team came together through competitions before forming a company: in 2022, their first project, an e-learning platform tailored for areas with limited connectivity won first place in the regional Y’ello Digital Talent competition. “A good startup doesn’t sell an idea; it provides a solution that creates value”, summarizes Touza Isaac. Ndemri is their answer to this challenge.

The platform is currently aimed at individual farmers, cooperatives, and agricultural research institutes. The coming months will be devoted to finalizing its features, refining the models using more local data, and launching pilot projects with institutional partners in Cameroon. The next step: integrating satellite imagery, IoT sensors, and real-time weather data to evolve from a diagnostic tool into a full-fledged decision-support platform at the farm or cooperative level.

The geographic scope follows the same logic of gradual expansion. NDEMRI first aims for national coverage before expanding into Central and West Africa, specifically to countries facing similar agricultural challenges: fragile soils, limited access to inputs, and exposure to climate-related risks. The data, hosted locally in Maroua, ensures response times adapted to the region’s connectivity conditions—a technical detail that, in the field, makes the difference between a tool that is used and one that is abandoned.

Agriculture employs more than 232 million people in sub-Saharan Africa (Source for 2015: U.S. Department of Agriculture). Losses due to crop diseases place a heavy burden on already meager incomes. Reducing this risk with a phone and a photo is the goal of NDEMRI, an initiative launched in Maroua, but whose potential impact extends far beyond the Sahel.

Maroua Innovation Technology (MIT) is the Cameroonian startup behind NDEMRI. Founded in October 2023 by five engineers and researchers, it develops digital solutions based on artificial intelligence in the fields of agriculture, education, healthcare, and the digital transformation of organizations. MIT operates out of Maroua, in the heart of Cameroon’s Far North Region, with the goal of building technologies tailored to African realities. The startup is incubated by Enovation Factory, Hodi’s partner incubator in Cameroon.

NDEMRI, developed by Maroua Innovation Technology, is supported by Hodipulse, a program that provides African seed-stage startups with one year of online presence.