" Well, in Zambia, the country I come from, one in eight people are smallholder farmers. It is how 80% of us make a livelihood from agriculture. Yet, with all of that, can you believe that less than 5% of our gross domestic product comes from agriculture? In simple terms, there’s a lot of wastage of really good crops. And the simple issue is you don’t have this digital evidence to prove what you’re growing, how you’re growing, or even where you’re growing” - Mwiche Mukoma, Founder & CEO
Jiraffe AI (Green Giraffe Technologies) is a Zambia-based AI-powered compliance infrastructure platform that captures, structures, and anchors the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) and agricultural supply chain data to the Cardano blockchain. Using AI voice capture to convert field recordings and WhatsApp messages into audit-ready records, Jiraffe enables smallholder farmers to meet EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) and global traceability standards — opening access to international markets. The company holds signed partnerships with Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and World Wide Fund for Natura (WWF), and is expanding to serve 10,000 farmers across Zambia's agricultural value chains. Co-founded in 2022 by Joseph Simukoko, Jiraffe AI addresses a critical gap: as EUDR compliance becomes mandatory for all exporters to EU markets by December 2026, only 30% of upstream actors currently have systems in place to meet the standard — and none are built for low-literacy, low-connectivity African farming contexts. Jiraffe AI will use the AI Hub's compute resources to train its own speech-to-text and Non-Language Processing (NLP) models for local language data capture — moving beyond third-party Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to build proprietary Intellectual Property (IP) — with the immediate goal of deploying these models during its upcoming WWF pilot with 10,000 farmers.
