Meet Rhona Brooks Birabwa a Ugandan behind the first Food Conversational E-Commerce AI Chatbot “ONA”

According Rhona; More than 60% of the Ugandans population depend on agriculture for food and livelihood. It’s Unfortunate that most of these farmers are always manipulated by middlemen who came to learn that farmers in Uganda will be ready to take up any price offered to them after harvest simply because of fear of post-harvest loss a factor that amplified by lack of more reliable and affordable means of produce preservation after harvest in addition to lack of direct contact to buyers and Market price information buyers barriers.

Its based on this revelation that she led the team at OnaChil that developed a conversational chatbot that allows farmers get direct access to buyers without passing through middlemen .

Ona chatbot is developed with high level of machine learning and artificial intelligence .Onabot is accessible on the Mobile ,whatsapp ,facebook and sms platform .

It has two sides ;

Front end ;

It allows organized farmer groups upload their harvest and be linked directly to buyers in towns all over the country .This is in addition to allowing cashless transactions between farmer groups and buyers & availing farmers with key information about current market prices all over key markets in the country

a) At the back end;

I. The chatbot analyses the periodic demand trends and in the end it can predict the supply-demand forecasts which we share affordably to our partner farmer groups and buyers for proper planning.