In 2023, 58.0% of the African population experienced moderate to severe food insecurity, with 21.6% facing severe food insecurity. Land-use and land-cover maps provide crucial insights for addressing food insecurity by improving agricultural efforts, including mapping and monitoring crop types and estimating yield. The development of global land-cover maps has been facilitated by the increasing availability of earth observation data and advancements in geospatial machine learning. However, these global maps exhibit lower accuracy and inconsistencies in Africa, partly due to the lack of representative training data. To address this issue, we propose a data-centric framework with a teacher-student model setup, which uses diverse data sources of satellite images and label examples to produce local land-cover maps. Our method trains a high-resolution teacher model on images with a resolution of 0.331 m/pixel and a low-resolution student model on publicly available images with a resolution of 10 m/pixel. The student model also utilizes the teacher model's output as its weak label examples through knowledge transfer. We evaluated our framework using Murang'a county in Kenya, renowned for its agricultural productivity, as a use case. Our local models achieved higher quality maps, with improvements of 0.14 in the F1 score and 0.21 in Intersection-over-Union, compared to the best global model. Our evaluation also revealed inconsistencies in existing global maps, with a maximum agreement rate of 0.30 among themselves. Our work provides valuable guidance to decision-makers for driving informed decisions to enhance food security.

A scholarship programme seeking to nurture talent in technological research in Africa's public universities has been launched. The three-year programme aims to meet the rising demand for expertise in responsible artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in the continent. While machine learning encompasses the study of computer algorithms and use of data, artificial intelligence involves the simulation of human intelligence by machines, usually computer system. The scholarship programme will support selected scholars to undertake PhD research in AI and ML in African universities, and early career academics to strengthen their research and development capacities in the two areas. Murang'a County to give dairy firm to farmers Sacco What Matiang'i didn't reveal on deployment of police officers The initiative, dubbed the A14D Africa scholarship, is implemented by the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS) based in Kenya in partnership with Kwame Nkrumah University in Ghana, University of Linkoping, Sweden, University Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, Senegal, University of California, Human Sciences Research Council and Institute for Humanities in Africa based in South Africa and the University of Eduardo Mondlane, Mozambique.