What is it?

CHEETAH is an acronym for Chains of Human Intelligence; towards Efficiency and Equity in Agro-Food Trade and Haulage.

CHEETAH aims to amplify the voice of value chain players (Transporters, Consumers, Growers, Officers from public and private agencies) by allowing them to communicate value chain shortcomings. The app also enables players to tap into chains of horticulture intelligence, which leads to better-informed decisions. This in turn reduces costs and increases profits for businesses, leads to lower market prices for consumers, fairer prices for growers, and better interventions by public and private agencies. CHEETAH is developed by Ujuizi Laboratories, a spin-off company of the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente (UT), in collaboration with several other partners incl. the European Space Agency (ESA), World Food Programme (WFP), Dutch Ministry of Foreign Aid and Development, and Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs. Highway tolls, customs charges and bribes can severely eat into the profits of players in the food supply chain, while poor road quality can destroy crops due to excessive vibration. Piloted with sellers, traders and transporters in Ghana and Burkina Faso, the CHEETAH application collected crowdsourced data on charges and measured road conditions through both very high resolution optical satellite imagery and the motion sensors of users’ phones. The result is a wealth of information that helps to monitor unforeseen costs and protect produce in transit. Possible future expansions of the application include a digital marketplace for crops, access to emergency vehicle repair, smart driving to measure and reduce CO2 and fuel usage.

Join

Join CHEETAH and contribute your observations on the Ghanaian roads using our location-aware CHEETAH App! Download from the Google Play Store to get started!

Technology

Profit = ƒ(T, H, L, Dur, Rq), with T = temperature, H = humidity, L = Light, Dur = journey duration, and Rq = Road pavement quality.

Dur is provided by Cheetah (crowd-sourced); T, H and L are derived from satellite data (Copernicus Sentinel-4 and MSG-3). Rq is provided by the smartphone motion sensor data (crowd-sourced) and high-res satellite imagery.
Cheetah Food is obtaining crop-sourcing information from Copernicus Sentinel-2 land cover and crop phenology products. Market price information is partly crowd-sourced augmenting by existing third-party crop market value services.

Customer benefit

Fairer prizes for growers and transporters
Lower market prices for consumers
Road maintenance planning through Labor-intensive Public Works (subcontracting to local engineers)
Crowd-sourcing such value chain information is cost-saving compared to traditional data collection techniques now in use to report barriers to regional trade (delays, bribes, bad road pavement conditions)

Summary

Amplifies the voice of value chain players by allowing them to share value chain shortcomings (delays, bribes, unforeseen costs such as breakdown of vehicles due to bad road pavement conditions) to exact accountability from officials
Gathers improved data on road pavement quality and post-harvest losses to help drive behavioral, policy and infrastructure improvements
Provides on the ground intelligence to decrease unforeseen expenditure for traders
Sourcing of food crops supported by ESA Copernicus Sentinels to improve business planning

Recognition

Cheetah won the ESA Copernicus Masters! The Copernicus Masters is the global innovation competition at the forefront of Earth observation (EO) data utilization. It was amongst the selected start-ups from +40 applicants of the WFP & ESA Food security challenge, called EO & AI for SDGs Innovation Programme 2022, where CHEETAH was further tested and developed in a real-world setting.

Contact

RAMANI, an Ujuizi Laboratories company
Valentijn Venus
+31 (0)6 29072718 (The Netherlands)

Write us at cheetah@ujuizi.com