This is the 26th post in a blog series to be published in 2021 by the Secretariat on behalf of the AU High-Level Panel on Emerging Technologies (APET) and the Calestous Juma Executive Dialogues (CJED)

Agriculture, more especially smallholder farming, presents a substantial socio-economic contribution towards Africa's livelihood, as well as jobs and wealth creation. Notably, 60% of Africa's population directly or indirectly depend on smallholder farming as a means of economic activity. Fundamentally, agriculture contributes approximately 23% of Sub-Sahara's GDP.[1]

Africa has several continental frameworks formulated and established to enable sustainable agriculture and food security across the continent. These African Union's frameworks are meant to be incorporated into Member States' national developmental frameworks to enable efficient agricultural activities and enhance Africa's food security. For example, the Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP) is a continental initiative that was created to assist Member States to alleviate hunger and poverty. This could be accomplished through robust agriculture-led development that will enable substantial investments, sustainable land management, and reliable water control systems.[2] As such, African countries are encouraged to enhance rural infrastructure through relevant agricultural innovation and technological development that can assist smallholder farmers within Member States.

The Programme for Infrastructural Development in Africa (PIDA) encourages African Member States to provide infrastructure necessary for more integrated transportation, energy provision, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and transboundary water networks to increase access to market for trade. This framework is also enhancing socio-economic growth that can augment jobs and wealth creation. On the other hand, the African Union's Science, Technology, and Innovation Strategy for Africa (STISA-2024) positions science, technology, and innovation (STI) towards significantly bolstering Africa's socio-economic development and growth activities. This includes agriculture, energy, environment, healthcare, infrastructure development, mining, security, and water management, among others. This strategy envisions Africa's transformation stimulated by innovation-led and knowledge-based economic activities.

Unfortunately, with such promising socio-economic potential and the above-mentioned African Union's developmental frameworks, Africa's agricultural activities remain barely uncharted. Even though there has been progressively increasing investment efforts towards smallholder farming by African governments, Africa's agriculture remains limited and barely scratching the surface on the underlying challenges farmers face within the agribusiness value chain. As such, Africa's agriculture remains vulnerable, and this is clearly demonstrated by the persistent food insecurity across the continent.

Food insecurity remains a major challenge for African countries because the number of African people who need food and poor still surpasses quality food supply. Subsequently, several African countries still require and rely on food donations and support from other continents.[3] Such persistent food insecurity is substantially due to unsustainable farming methodologies, limited mechanisation efforts, limited skills capacity, and ineffective farming innovative technologies. Consequently, subsistence and smallholder farming persists, and most farming activities in Africa are executed for a small community or family consumption only. Additionally, climate change has resulted in unpredictable weather patterns such as floods and progressive desertification due to droughts. This has further exacerbated the already delicate farming conditions in Africa. Thus, this negatively affects Africa's resources base, more especially in communities liable to soil degradation, water shortages, and increasing desertification.

Despite the innumerable challenges currently facing Africa's smallholder farming, the African Union High Level Panel on Innovation and Emerging Technologies (APET) believes that smallholder farming supported by innovation and emerging technologies can enhance Africa's job creation and ensure adequate food security. Therefore, APET is encouraging African countries to enable the adoption of innovation and technologies essential for that smallholder farming to increase quality food production and supply and subsequently ensure food security. In this way, African countries can support agriculture-inclined technologies such as artificial intelligence, drone technologies, the internet of things, and blockchain technology to enhance precision agriculture.

Precision agriculture is progressively gaining traction within Africa's farming activities. Notably, precision agriculture utilises digital technology, artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, and machine learning to help farmers monitor their fields by analysing crop stresses such as water shortages, soil chemistry and nutrients, and pests and diseases on specific parts of the fields in real-time. Consequently, Africans can increase crop yield productivities. Primarily, precision agriculture utilises site-specific information through technology-based management systems that can collect and analyse data of soil chemistry to determine crops' nutrients, understand patterns of pests and diseases, and analyse soil moisture. Such data becomes critical in enhancing smallholder farming yield's profitability, sustainability, and environment protection.[4],[5]

To demonstrate precision agriculture applications in Africa, South African fruit farmers have benefited from adopting precision agriculture for their farming activities. For example, the Western Cape Department of Agriculture (WCDoA) has provided the state-of-the-art precision agricultural-based technology, known as the Fruit Look application. This application is available to deciduous fruits and grapes farmers in the Western Cape, South Africa. Fundamentally, the Fruit Look technology enables fruits farmers, to improve their water-usage efficiency by exploiting spatial data derived from remote sensing technologies. As such, farmers can efficiently utilise water as the region is drought susceptible. The application allows fruits farmers to maintain enormous agricultural productivity of fruits with water-resource saving capacities. In addition, the application provides data on crop growth, evapotranspiration deficits, and crop nitrogen status. Such data is not only capacitating farmers with better water usage capacities but also enhancing them with cost-effective crop management capacities.[6]

Furthermore, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe farmers have also benefitted from precision agriculture technologies known as the Chameleon and Wetting Front Detector Sensors technology. The Chameleon and Wetting Front Detector Sensors technology has enabled small-scale farmers in these countries to reduce their irrigation frequency by approximately 50 times while at the same time doubling their production capacity.[7] Essentially, this AI-enabled sensing technology enables farmers better manage their irrigation scheduling frameworks and soil nutrients management systems. This is because the sensors can detect fields' soil moisture and nutrient contents. Thus, effectively helping farmers decide on appropriate water schedules for their plants and subsequently improving their water-saving efforts. Consequently, farmers can reassign their human resource labour to other essential farming activities within their fields.

Companies and institutions are currently adapting and broadening smart farming technologies to enhance precision agricultural revolution across the continent. For example, a Nigerian start-up company Zenvus collects and analyses soil data across Nigeria to tailor relevant farming advice towards farmers on planting protocols. Furthermore, its digital services allow smallholder farmers to gain appropriate insights on real-time crop prices and boost capital investments as well as crowdfunding frameworks using computers and smart devices.

An AgroCenta platform provides weather forecasts to Ghanaian farmers and also enables Ghanaian farmers to directly and digitally trade with large companies such as Nestlé and Diageo.[8] In addition, an emerging agricultural technology hub in Kenya known as SunCulture is selling solar-powered pumps to enable cost-effective and affordable irrigation.[9] On the other hand, a Nairobi-based company called SolarFreeze provides solar-powered cold storage units for smallholder farmers and traders.[10] In Cameroon, AgroSpaces provides farmers with live pricing data to enable their pricing protocols in markets.[11]

APET is acutely aware of the challenges that smallholder farmers face that are responsible for effectively deterring the agriculture-enabling technology revolution. For instance, the limited internet penetration rates exhibit the greatest hindrances towards STI-based farming in Africa. Furthermore, the limited digital technology related literacy, more especially in rural Africa, is also presenting the greatest obstacles towards fully adopting technology-based farming in Africa. Therefore, to address these digital technology literacy challenges in rural Africa, African innovators should consider incorporating comprehensive capacity strengthening and training frameworks for digital technology applications and services. In addition, the telephone penetration rates remain disproportionally distributed across the continent, with an overall penetration rate of 44%, compared to a 66% global penetration rate. African countries should increase reliable telephone and network penetration across the continent.

There are also serious concerns that emerging technologies may encourage smallholder farmers towards utilising destructive chemical-based farming methods to enhance yields in the short term. In the long run, these technology solutions may effectively diminish soil quality over time. Thus, African countries should carefully implement sustainable technology-based farming activities so to ensure jobs and wealth creation.[12] Notably, the success of Africa's precision farming will significantly depend on education and skills capacity, internet connectivity, and financing mechanism that African governments can predominantly enable. The active participation of the private sector in partnership with African governments can significantly increase precision agriculture investments and encourage agribusiness exponential growth.

APET also recognises that precision agriculture can potentially grow Africa, but African countries need to address the accompanying socio-economic and technological challenges adequately. For example, studies have demonstrated precision agriculture enabling systematic mapping remains limited in several African countries. Primarily, such enabling precision agriculture technology advancements are predominantly observed in South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya, against other African countries. Even within these advanced countries, the most precision enabling systematic mapping has been carried out by a few large companies and farmers with high economic capacity. Therefore, this leads to inconsistent and unreliable precision agriculture enabling data, even within advanced African countries' precision agriculture. Unfortunately, based on the authorship of the precision agriculture-based articles in Africa, precision agriculture data significantly depends on non-African researchers. Subsequently, this challenges African countries with data availability and ownership challenges. Further to this, approximately 21 African countries have no existing research data to enable their precision agriculture efforts and accompanying technology development.[13] Thus, African countries should increase efforts towards investigative research and data generation that can promote the usage of precision agriculture, more especially for livestock management.

Finally, for African countries to achieve food security through the existing frameworks to achieve the aspirations of the Africa Union's Agenda 2063, African countries are urged by APET to adequately adopt innovation and emerging technologies that can bolster precision agriculture within their countries. However, African countries should collaboratively provide conducive environments to maximise the potential of precision agriculture technologies fully. This can effectively and sufficiently improve Africa's sustainable and cost-effective precision agriculture for smallholder farming. In conclusion, by adopting precision agriculture, Africa's farming will grow to help eradicate hunger across the African continent.

Featured Bloggers – APET Secretariat

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[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/agriculture/our-insights/winning-in-africas-agricultural-market#.

[2] https://au.int/en/agenda2063/continental-frameworks.

[3] https://www.intechopen.com/books/food-security-in-africa/the-role-of-small-scale-farmers-in-ensuring-food-security-in-africa.

[4] https://www.unitrans.africa/unitrans-africa/precision-farming-in-africa/.

[5] https://sentektechnologies.com/product-range/soil-data-probes/?gclid=CjwKCAjwrPCGBhALEiwAUl9X0wpsobPhH394POmRWlvsN8HjqqRFFS5nR3oaph4iPjOwjoI3jsNNnxoCTrYQAvD_BwE.

[6] http://www.greenagri.org.za/assets/documents-/SmartAgri/Case-Studies/1.-Case-Study-FruitLook-FINAL.pdf.

[7] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324372637_Precision_Agriculture_and_Food_Security_in_Africa.

[8] https://www.ft.com/content/3316885c-b07d-11e8-87e0-d84e0d934341.

[9] https://www.ft.com/content/cf52b0b2-2c98-11e6-bf8d-26294ad519fc.

[10] https://itweb.africa/content/WnxpE74gOYDvV8XL.

[11] https://startup.info/agrospaces/.

[12] J.M. Nyaga, C.M. Onyango, J. Wetterlind, M. Söderström, Precision agriculture research in sub‑Saharan Africa countries: a systematic map, Precision Agriculture (2021) 22:1217–1236. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11119-020-09780-w1 3.

[13] J.M. Nyaga, C.M. Onyango, J. Wetterlind, M. Söderström, Precision agriculture research in sub-Saharan Africa countries: a systematic map. Precision Agriulture 22 (2021) 1217–1236. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11119-020-09780-w.