About OpenTrace

OpenTrace is an African-led agricultural intelligence startup building the continent’s first large-scale data platform for agriculture, climate, and food systems. We transform fragmented datasets from public, private, and field-level sources into structured, validated, and AI-powered insights that help governments, investors, and agribusinesses make better decisions.

We are at an exciting stage, building out our partnerships, expanding our data architecture, and preparing to scale our prototype into a fully deployable platform across Africa.

The Opportunity

OpenTrace offers Bachelor students the opportunity to contribute to a cutting-edge agricultural data platform while gaining practical experience in a real-world production environment. By structuring fragmented agricultural data from five African countries (Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone), validating them through multiple points, and layering a user-friendly AI interface on top, OpenTrace is creating one of the most extensive African agricultural data platforms where insights are not only available, but accessible through a simple question.

Available Project Tracks

– Agricultural Data Landscape

Following the agricultural data landscape track, you will conduct systematic literature reviews and data source analyses within specific agricultural domains across our five target countries. Your projects could focus on topics such as crop production statistics, trade flows, food security indicators, climate data, or socioeconomic factors which are affecting agricultural productivity.

– Business Development

Following the business development track, you will analyze the agricultural tech and AI landscape and identify key players in data services and agricultural analytics across Africa as well as synergy and partnership opportunities for OpenTrace. During your project, you will gain an understanding of both the business landscape in the agricultural sphere on the continent and collect real life experience in the area of business development opportunities.

– Data Classification and Discovery

Following the data classification and discovery track, you will work directly with our data infrastructure to explore and contribute to data classification and quality assessment. This hands-on data track provides exposure to real-world engineering challenges such as the harmonization of data sources, quality validation processes, and metadata management systems. You will get to explore a wide variety of data points on African agriculture while also learning about important data and engineering concepts such as schema design, data lineage tracking, automated quality checks, ETL pipeline development, and scalable data processing architectures.

Structure and Support

Bachelor projects at OpenTrace can be structured as independent thesis projects or supervised internships for academic credit. Students receive mentoring from our data and agricultural domain experts as well as access to our cloud infrastructure and collected resources. We will structure regular feedback sessions with you to ensure the success of your project and guide you on your learning journey. All projects are designed to produce tangible outcomes that can help solve real-world challenges while meeting academic requirements.

Through your project at OpenTrace you will gain experience with production-scale data systems and cloud computing platforms, as well as domain knowledge on African agriculture. Projects provide exposure to industry-standard tools and methodologies while addressing real challenges in African agricultural development.