Deep Learning IndabaX Zimbabwe and GDG Harare invite you to tackle a critical challenge at the heart of our nation's food security.

The Challenge: A Threat to Our Staple Crop

Maize is Zimbabwe’s most important staple crop, feeding millions and driving rural livelihoods. However, these yields are increasingly threatened by fungal leaf diseases like Common Rust, Grey Leaf Spot, and Blight, affecting farms from Manicaland to Masvingo.

Smallholder farmers, who grow most of the country’s maize, often lack the tools for early and accurate disease detection. This leads to devastating yield losses, financial strain, and food insecurity.

Your Mission: Build an AI-Powered Solution

This hackathon challenges you to build an AI-powered image classification model that can accurately identify maize leaf diseases from a photograph. Your model must classify images into one of four categories:

• Common Rust

• Grey Leaf Spot

• Blight

• Healthy

The ideal solution will be accurate, fast, and robust enough to work under real-world conditions (varying light, angles, and image quality). Bonus points for a model lightweight enough to run on mobile devices, enabling practical use in remote farming areas.

Why Your Work Matters By developing this tool, you're not just solving a technical problem—you’re helping to bring precision agriculture to smallholders across Zimbabwe. Your work can empower farmers, safeguard livelihoods, and strengthen our national food supply chain.

Who Should Participate? We are calling on data scientists, machine learning engineers, software developers, researchers, and university students passionate about using technology for social good.

Ready to Make an Impact? Join us to build, learn, and create a solution with real-world impact.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with your Hackathon Lead, Shannon Tafadzwa Sikadi.