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By Oluyede Ajayi, Senior Program Coordinator of the ACP-EU Technical Center for Agriculture (CTA) based in the Netherlands
Walmart. Amazon. Tesla Many of the world's largest companies have started modestly – and would not be what they are today without the help of start-up loans.
But in sub-Saharan Africa, small businesses providing an average of 24 percent of GDP across the continent receive a meager 1 percent of bank loans.
These are smallholder farmers in Africa, who make up more than half of the continent's population and are tasked with feeding an ever-growing and increasingly hungry population.
One of the reasons the funds are so difficult to obtain is the risk inherent in an agriculture subject to unstable weather conditions.
Sufficient investment will never be unlocked as long as farmers' future profits remain so uncertain. Yet the food and beverage market in Africa is expected to reach $ 1 trillion by 2030, if the necessary investments are made. We must find ways to open African agriculture to this investment, even in the face of climate change.
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More than 4,000 farmers in the mountainous region of Butare, in southwestern Uganda, are on track to achieve this goal. They have set up digital profiles, which map the location, size and productivity, as well as their holdings. Unmanned aerial vehicles examined the sky for additional information. When combined, these data can serve as a guarantee that these farmers receive fertilizer and credit to grow their business. The data provide a credible forecast of farmers' needs and their ability to repay their loans.
This approach of establishing a digital profile of farmers is one of our best choices to strengthen their operations and unlock funding.
Centralizing data on farmers' needs facilitates the provision of personalized advice and services such as weather forecasts to help improve resilience to climate shocks. To this end, 74,000 farmers have been identified numerically in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi.
Phineas Muyabi is living proof that it works. When he retired from the Zambian army in 2001, he invested his lump sum payment in seeds and other agricultural inputs. But the drought destroyed her crops and in the following years her family had to rely on food aid.
Now, he receives weather warnings and SMS agricultural advice, as part of a regional project to improve the resilience of grain and livestock producers in Southern Africa, led by CTA. A digital platform hosted by the Zambia Open University collects data collected by Zambia's National Agricultural Information Service.
In neighboring Zimbabwe, this warning system comes with a weather insurance product, called the EcoFarmer combo, which allows farmers to insure their crops against the risk of excessive rainfall and excessive dry days per dollar. per month.
These digital innovations will be the key to unlocking the investment that African agriculture needs to reach its potential. What will be the key to ensuring their adoption?
Some technology deployment programs rely solely on the appeal of their products. For farmers who have little money and are afraid of risk, this is rarely enough to attract them on board. That's why the EcoFarmer combo is a "bundled" solution. It provides access to agronomy advice, seed and weather insurance (a relatively new concept for farmers) as well as funeral insurance (a product well known to farmers). This provides farmers with several levels of protection and creates an entry point for new technology approaches.
Funding to improve the telecommunication infrastructure will also be extremely important. Between 1998 and 2008, total private sector investment in telecommunications in sub-Saharan Africa reached $ 49 billion, mainly in the mobile market. For this kind of investment to continue, African governments must pave the way for the development of telecommunication markets by providing investment-friendly policies and well-functioning regulatory institutional frameworks for this type of private sector investment to flourish. continue. future.
Encouraging countries with similar climatic conditions to join together and pool their resources will also help to reduce the risks associated with setting up systems as complex and technical as weather insurance. The seeds of this type of collaboration have already been sown in southern Africa and will enable many more farmers to benefit from the technology.
The United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Poland is an important moment to defend this cause. As stakeholders discuss how to transform our food system in a changing climate, stimulating investment in the region that is home to six of the ten most vulnerable countries to climate change must be a priority.
Back in Uganda, a newly trained 25-year-old air-ground surveillance expert summarized the potential digital innovations offered to African agriculture as he piloted a drone over the plantation. # 39; Igara. "With this technology, he says, the sky is the limit."
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