Coach, AFRETEC SEED Challenge winners
Coached, with Jared Swart, Dr. Crop: a pan-African student team whose offline crop-disease tool won the agriculture track.
The AFRETEC SEED Challenge is a pan-African student competition run through the AFRETEC network, which is led by Carnegie Mellon University Africa. In 2026 I coached a team with Jared Swart. The students came from Wits, Sol Plaatje University and universities in Kenya and Rwanda.
The team built Dr. Crop in 48 hours: an offline tool that diagnoses crop disease from a phone camera, using TensorFlow Lite and OpenCV, and gives farming advice in local languages. It won the agriculture track.
The photos are from the dinner at Wits, where coaches and participants received certificates of recognition and everyone came up on stage for a group photo.
At the AFRETEC SEED Challenge dinner at Wits, with Jared Swart behind. On stage at the AFRETEC SEED Challenge dinner at Wits. Talhah Patelia is third from the left.
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