Gone are the days when you have to physically go to the farm before you can call yourself a farmer. Even if you are one, there are now reliable and effective tech tools that can help improve agricultural yield, storage and ultimately, double income. Below are some of the service providers tapping technology to secure Africa’s food security.
Founded in 2016, Farmcrowdy is Nigeria’s 1st Digital Agriculture Platform focused on connecting farm sponsors with real farmers to increase food production while promoting youth participation in Agriculture.
Kitovu is a web/mobile based decentralized fertilizer/seedling warehousing system based in Nigeria that matches the right inputs to different farm locations owned by smallholder farmers in distant pocket locations, using geo-location and soil data collected by the mobile app.
Wakati developed the world’s first standalone solution for the preservation of fruits and vegetables without using cooling. Smallholder farmers can store their produce on their farms in a protective microclimate inside a tent with a storage of 200 -1000 kg, using one litre of water per week, and powered by a small solar panel.
Illuminum Greenhouses is an agri-tech greenhouse and drip installation company in Kenya working with smallholder farmers to improve production and increase efficiency through the use of new modern technologies. They construct affordable modern greenhouses and install automated drip irrigation kits for smallholder farmers by using locally available materials and solar-powered sensors.
Apollo Agriculture helps farmers in emerging markets increase their profits. They use agronomic machine learning, remote sensing, and mobile technology to help farmers access to credit, high-quality farm inputs, and customized advice. Their first product is a customized package of farm inputs, farming advice, and credit delivered to farmers in Kenya.
AMIntegrated Aerial designed a simple spray boom accessory, called the FiKapSy – short for ‘Flying Knapsack System,’ for agriculture drone applications in the precision dispersal of agro-inputs on farm fields reducing excessive use/ waste of agrochemicals that lead to the degradation of the soil and environment across Africa.
Pula is an insurance intermediary that implements data-driven agricultural insurance. Pula assists hundreds of thousands of small-scale farmers across six countries in Africa. Farmers can safeguard their crops and invest in their farms through financial tools that take advantage of the rising use of mobile technology.
Futurepump develops solar-powered irrigation technologies to help the 500 million one-acre farmers around the world. Based in Kenya, it offers smallholder farmers a cheaper, cleaner and more sustainable alternative to costly and polluting petrol or diesel pumps. Irrigating crops on demand leads to more reliable harvests. It also gives farmers the opportunity to grow and sell crops out of season, bringing huge economic benefits to the farmers, their families, and the wider community.
Thermogenn has developed high-performance, off-grid, portable, evaporative coolers to expand smallholder farmers’ marketable dairy products in sub-Saharan Africa, mitigating spoilage to allow farmers to sell their dairy products later in the day instead of only in the morning.
Syecomp specializes in the acquisition, processing, analysis and synthesis of imagery from remotely sensed satellites and multispectral image data from drones to monitor field crops/vegetative status and identify and mitigate potential diseases across fields in Sub-Saharan Africa on farms in Ghana.
