Supporting Digital Agriculture Through GeoAI : A Crop Type Dataset of Four Food Basket Crops in Rwanda

Agriculture is a major economic activity, contributing approximately 25% of Rwanda's gross domestic product and employing nearly 65% of its population. Recognising its critical role, the Government of Rwanda has prioritised digital agriculture to manage the sector sustainably. Decision support systems based on remote sensing and Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) offer a transformative opportunity to enhance regional food security by providing real‐time data, improving agricultural forecasting and mitigating the impacts of climate variability. However, GeoAI approaches require labelled, ground‐referenced crop type data for model calibration and validation, which is scarce in sub‐Saharan Africa. To address this gap, we collected crop type data across Musanze, Nyabihu, Nyagatare and Ruhango districts of Rwanda between May and June 2025 to support the development of GeoAI crop monitoring approaches. The dataset, collected using KoboToolbox, integrates the Joint Experiment for Crop Assessment and Monitoring guidelines for field data collection and the Food and Agriculture Organisation's indicative crop classification. We targeted four food‐basket crops from Rwanda's Crop Intensification Programme: bean, maize, Irish potato and rice. In total, 2739 GPS‐located points were collected and used to generate 914 crop‐labelled polygons: 112 for beans, 107 for Irish potato, 417 for maize, 34 for rice and 244 for mixed‐crop fields. Polygons were digitised using four cardinal‐direction photographs taken during fieldwork and Planet imagery acquired during the season. Besides crop labels, the point data include detailed agronomic information such as farm management practices, anti‐erosion measures, cropping systems, agroforestry practices (including fruit‐tree presence), administrative units and GPS coordinates. This rich dataset provides robust, nuanced information for crop monitoring, yield estimation and digital agriculture innovation in Rwanda and beyond.