A team of researchers from Bioversity International in Africa has created a smartphone app to help banana farmers protect their crops against diseases and pests. The Tumaini App (meaning'hope' in Swahili) is based on artificial intelligence algorithms that have been trained to recognize five major diseases and one common pest affecting the world's favorite fruit, demonstrating accuracy of more than 90 per cent in most models. The software has been tested in Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, Benin, China, and Uganda. Tumaini can recommend the means of addressing a specific disease and automatically upload identification data into a global database to help coordinate international response. It is hoped that the app can stop disease outbreaks and protect the livelihood of small, independent farmers.