Terms of use

Chirimwa is an agricultural monitoring system built by the Faculty of Computer Engineering at the University of Zimbabwe. It reads your field sensors, pulls weather and satellite data for your land, analyses leaf photographs you upload, and estimates what your fields may produce.

It is a research project, not a commercial product with a support contract behind it. That shapes several of the terms below, and we would rather say so plainly than bury it.

You need an account. Keep your password to yourself — anything done through your account is treated as done by you. Tell us promptly if you think someone else has got in.

You agree not to:

• ·upload photographs of people, or anything you do not have the right to upload
• ·register sensors on land you have no right to monitor
• ·attempt to reach another account's data, or to disrupt the service for others
• ·use the service to break Zimbabwean law

We may suspend an account doing any of these. You can close yours at any time — see section 6.

Chirimwa runs three models over your data:

• ·A leaf-image classifier that suggests a likely tobacco disease from a photograph, with a confidence figure.
• ·A water balance model that estimates whether the soil can meet the crop's demand, and when to irrigate.
• ·A yield model that estimates what a field may produce, trained partly on harvests you record.

Every one of these produces an estimate, not a finding. A disease result is a suggestion from an image, not a diagnosis by an agronomist or a plant pathologist. A yield figure shown to the kilogram is not that precise; it is useful for comparing fields and spotting trends, not as a number to sell against. An irrigation recommendation knows nothing about your borehole, your labour, or the rain that fell on the far side of the farm.

Before anything costly or irreversible — spraying, uprooting, committing a harvest — confirm with an extension officer or agronomist. You remain responsible for what happens on your land.

These outputs are generated without a person in the loop, which the law treats as a distinct thing to consent to. Your rights over that are in section 4 of the privacy policy, including how to withdraw the consent or ask a person to review a result.

Your readings, photographs, harvest records and notes remain yours. We claim no ownership of them. You grant us only the permission needed to run the service for you — to store them, display them back to you, and process them to produce the estimates you asked for.

We may also use your data to improve the models, but only after identifiers are stripped from it, and you can opt out of that entirely. Section 9 of the privacy policy sets out exactly what that involves.

The software, models and interface remain ours. Nothing here gives you a licence to copy or redistribute them.

We will try to keep Chirimwa running and correct, but this is a research project on university infrastructure, and we cannot promise it will be available when you need it. Satellite and weather data come from third parties who may change, throttle or withdraw their services; sensors fail, and connections drop.

The service is provided as it is, without warranty. To the fullest extent Zimbabwean law allows, we are not liable for loss of crop, income, or opportunity arising from the use of Chirimwa or from reliance on its estimates — including where a reading is missing, delayed or wrong.

Nothing in these terms limits any liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

You may close your account whenever you like, and withdrawing your consent to us holding your data has the same effect. Section 8 of the privacy policy sets out what is deleted and when.

Export anything you want to keep first — the History page will give you every reading as a spreadsheet.

We may close an account that breaches section 2, or if the project itself ends. If the project ends we will give you reasonable notice and time to export your records.

If we change these terms in a way that materially affects you, we will tell you in the app before the change takes effect. The date at the top of this page always shows the current version, and the version you accepted is recorded against your account.