How African Farmers Can Leverage the Continuing Digital Revolution to Improve Africa’s Food System

The continuous digital revolution has significantly induced innovation in many sectors of the global economy. In the agricultural ecosystem, the narrative has changed and is still changing. Agricultural production has transitioned and is still transitioning from the primitive stage of relying on nature and crude implements to modern data-driven technologies and methodologies. According to experts, the next phase of agricultural practices will be largely driven by data of all kinds.

Unfortunately, in Africa digital agriculture has been growing rather unsteadily compared to other regions of the world, especially the global north. This has continued to impact how people within the region grow and source for their foods.

Africa’s food system has been disproportionately pressured by its increasing population, resulting in high incidence of hunger, malnutrition and criminality of the region. Therefore, it has been suggested that to meet the required food production for Africa’s projected population of 4.5 billion by 2050, stakeholders within the Africa’s agricultural workspace must begin to look in the direction of big data and digital technologies to optimize the food system.

It is believed that the future of Africa rests on the ability to resourcefully harness the vast potentials of the region’s agricultural ecosystem. One key thing that has been emphasized by experts in this regard is a deliberate, concerted effort to bridge the gap of knowledge in the Industry through increased investment in research and development as well as advocacy and training for data usage by farmers and other stakeholders.

High level of illiteracy among Africa’s smallholder farmers remains a big challenge. This problem often results in lack of capacity for system and collaborative thinking among farmers which is much needed for value creation and delivery across the agricultural value chains. Consequently, many local farmers tend to focus mainly on the production value chain.

However, when Agriculture is limited to just planting and harvesting, the food security that we all talk about may not be realized. Hence, farmers need to understand the entire business of Agriculture and how to link one part of the value chain to the other.

Data is a major element to achieving food security and large-scale production under controlled condition with minimal risks. However, beyond farming on a large scale, it is important to institutionalize data system for Agriculture so that people can become conscious of it and then collaborate towards driving innovation in the industry. It is said that in Africa, people will not go hungry due to insufficient farmlands or farmers but due to lack of capacity to leverage data and data analytics for sustainable agricultural practices.

Key Recommendations

1. Farmers and other key stakeholders in Africa’s agriculture industry need to develop capacity in data analytics. They need to understand what data to collect, how to collect these data and how to build models to analyse and generate insight for sustainable agricultural production.
2. We need to develop a system to collect data and store them in a location that is easily accessible to all farmers or stakeholders that need them.
3. A strong sense of collaboration should be encouraged among practitioners in the industry.
4. Knowledge gap existing in the area of developing indigenously made devices such as sensors and artificial intelligence models should be bridged. Research institute and agriculture-focused institution should look in this direction to ensure that we have affordable digital devices that can enhance farming practices locally.
5. Government should provide enabling environment that will promote data-driven Agriculture in the continent.