Entries Open for Llama Impact Grants as Maiden Winners Get Nearly $1m

By Aduragbemi Omiyale

Innovators from Africa, the Middle East and Turkey have been urged to enter the Llama Impact Grants put together by social media giant, Meta.

Applications, according to a statement from the company, will open until Friday, November 22, 2024, and the theme will focus on pressing social cases.

The initiative was introduced in October 2023, with over 800 submissions from organisations in more than 90 countries.

The program highlights innovative solutions leveraging Llama models to address major challenges in education and the environment, as well as technological innovation.

It was designed to support innovative use cases of Llama 2 and Llama 3 that address pressing social issues.

As one of the Llama Impact Grants winners, Digital Green, in partnership with One Acre Fund, will receive $500,000, while the runner-up, Jacaranda Health, will receive $300,000 to support their project.

Digital Green’s Farmer Chat project aims to develop a multilingual AI chatbot that provides customised, on-demand agricultural advisory services to small-scale farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Llama will be fine-tuned on a vast repository of agricultural data to adapt the model to the specific needs and contexts of different regions. Its conversational capabilities will then be used to provide comprehensive and practical responses in a variety of languages including Hindi, Swahili, and Kikuyu.

As for Jacaranda Health, it aims to expand its digital health tool, PROMPTS, which uses SMS behavioural nudges and an AI-enabled clinical helpdesk to empower new and expecting mothers across Kenya, Ghana, and Eswatini to seek and connect with the right care at the right time.

The goal is to make PROMPTS the go-to resource for personalised maternal and newborn health support across Sub-Saharan Africa.

In addition to the Llama Impact Grants, Meta also announced the recipients of the Llama Impact Innovation Awards, with winners receiving up to $35,000, including mentorship, partnership opportunities and ad credits, to further their innovative work with Llama.

The winners are HelpMum, which has developed an innovative chatbot service that delivers accurate and timely information on vaccination and immunisation; Tanzania AI Community’s chatbot, Twiga, which provides teachers with a virtual assistant for generating exams, lesson notes and course materials tailored to the Tanzanian curriculum via WhatsApp; and Flow Informatics’ phosoAI project, which aims to address food insecurity in Malawi by enhancing a WhatsApp-based chatbot that provides people with real-time information on food prices, availability, and agricultural practices, particularly in rural and urban areas.