Kulimax mobile application

Abstract

Unemployment is one of the biggest challenges that contributes to the high poverty rates in Uganda. This is because there are few jobs compared to the big population in this country and this population continues to grow rapidly. In an attempt to solve this problem, the youth have engaged in carrying out agriculture of high value crops and mainly focusing on growing oyster mushrooms due to its many production advantages which include less farming space and low costs involved to start this venture. However, these youths have faced a lot of challenges when trying to maximize pro ts from growing this high value crop (oyster mushrooms) and the reasons for these problems are due lack of cost friendly tools for optimizing the available mushroom resources that would enable them to attain high pro ts from this venture. The second biggest problem they face is that the current available oyster mushroom diagnosis mechanisms (done by agronomists) is very costly and takes a long time to identify diseases (takes a total of four days to complete laboratory tests on mushroom samples) which leads to a lot of losses hence making this method ine cient for this process Kulimax comes with a mobile application to provide cost friendly, e cient and accurate tools for optimizing pro ts through dividing a farmer's investment capital amongst the required resources and a time saving inexpensive tool for quickly diagnosing mushroom diseases that are observed by the changes in the colors of the mushroom cap through the use of image processing technology. This project has proven to be of great relevance in helping Ugandan farmers to improve oyster mushroom production and to further bring them closer to realizing their goal of creating a reliable employment source because both the pro t optimizing and diagnosis tools have solved the major limitations that the farmers were facing.