Africa is an agri lover’s dream with abundant uncultivated arable land roughly over half the global total; tropical climates that permit long growing seasons; young labor force and an expanding population that provides a ready market for the product consumption. Agricultural productivity remains far from developed world standards. Over 90% of Agriculture depends on rainfall, with no artificial irrigation aid
Africa with more than 60% of its population living in the rural areas and depends on agriculture, by and large, expecting for the much-needed breakthrough in the present state. The continent with 1.166 billion people has more than 32% of its dependency for GDP that comes from the agriculture sector is struggling to revamp it modern ways of farming, technology and infrastructure.
However, African Countries are yet to explore the opportunities to ensure sustainable food security and production.
Technology can disrupt the way African agriculture operates
Exploring Internet of Things (IOT) enabled smart irrigation devices that combine cloud based data analytics, GIS enabled technologies, and weather monitoring can help the small holders to know how and when to apply agri- inputs to get optimal results.
To work their land, farmers in Nigeria and Kenya can hire affordable tractors, all through their mobile phones. This is an example of how technology has already started disrupting agriculture in Africa
In Africa, almost 50 percent of the food produced is wasted; according to the
In most African countries where refrigeration technologies are not strong enough to withstand the harsh environment conditions, power grids are not capable of delivering reliable energy solar powered cooling can be a blessing.
Solar cold rooms with battery-less backup, like Ecofrost, can help farmers to keep their produce fresh even during power outage. Farmers using leaves to cover their crops in order to keep them cool, now have an option to keep their produce cool in a solar cold room. The temperature is maintained, and the farmers are also not forced to sell the produce at the end of the day at unfavourable prices.
The water pumps that run on solar energy has a huge scope to address this problem of irrigation and at the same time will provide an opportunity of year-round utilization of the same land area, thus increasing the production and will also eventually reduce Africa’s dependency on imports from other nations to some extent. Solar irrigation systems developed by Ecozen will definitely help to irrigate the African farmlands
Throughout Africa, technology led transformation is underway to transform the agriculture sector, and as technology becomes widely available, disruption in agriculture is all set to accelerate
