"The innovative AgriHyphen AI app, developed by Burundian tech company Hyphen Tech, is transforming agriculture in the country, helping farmers detect plant diseases at an early stage and protect their crops. Footage filmed in Gisagara on Wednesday shows farmers checking fields with a new app to discover possible diseases still invisible to the human eye before they are able to take hold. “The most common diseases affecting maize are leaf blight and pests. This application helps us detect the stage of the disease, and farmers can then work together to limit its spread in the field,” said farme Ir Don Divin Matemere. “As we say in Kirundi, "you have to protect yourself before you are overwhelmed.” “You will notice that its leaves have holes in them, but you may search for the cause and miss it,” farmer Dafrose Nshimirimana added. “But with the use of this application to diagnose diseases, and once we have the medicines, I hope that agriculture will develop. Our fields will breathe very well with good results, which is what every farmer wants.” A creative fusion of cutting-edge AI tools and ever-growing real-time data, the platform can recognise 37 different diseases across 7 crops, namely potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, maize, beans, cassava, and apples - and with almost 100 percent accuracy. “Every year there is a loss of at least 40 to 50 percent in agricultural yields, due to plant diseases and also a lack of new technologies,” Co-Founder of Hyphen, Elie Babuya, explained. “We thought about whether we could develop an application that helps perform diagnosis and prediction of plant diseases based on machine learning and AI.” The app developers plan to further expand app functionality to help it recognise an even greater number of diseases."