Digital agriculture innovations
Digital agriculture innovations consist of digital technologies and services/solutions.
Digital agriculture solutions in Commonwealth Africa predominantly provide market linkages (52 percent) and crop-based pre advisory (60 percent) services.1
The digital solution mapping reveals that despite the region having significant logistical challenges particularly the transportation and storage of agricultural inputs and produce2, very few of the mapped digital solutions in this region were found to have a logistics and supply chain solution in their value proposition.
From the systemic constraints affecting agriculture, there is a gap in the availability of solutions providing or related to financial access and solutions (only 26 per cent of mapped solutions in Commonwealth Africa) provide financial access and insurance. Part of the reason smallholders find it hard to access financing is the lack of attractive collateral options. Land is the primary form of collateral, and yet less than 20 per cent of the land in sub-Saharan Africa is formally registered.3 Due to this gap, there is a need for solutions that provide alternative credit scoring.
Digital technologies deployed in Commonwealth Africa
The application of smart farming techniques and methods is still low in Africa. This section highlights some notable cases of the application of various smart farming methods in the region.
Digital technologies are being applied to solving several systemic constraints across Commonwealth Africa, from trade and supply chain constraints to climate change and women and youth inclusion.
Read more in the short snapshots below.
Deployment of the AI assistant plant detection algorithm Nuru
Nuru is an Artificially Intelligent crop disease detection algorithm that has been developed with the UN FAO, CGIAR, and other publicly funded institutions.4 As an AI-enabled assistant, Nuru has learned to diagnose multiple diseases in Cassava, fall armyworm infections in African maize, potato disease, and wheat disease. It is also diagnosing spotted lanternfly pests.
The Nuru project expects to radically transform pest and disease monitoring by using artificial intelligence (AI), advanced sensor technology, and crowdsourcing to connect the global agricultural community to smallholders. It aims to increase the effectiveness of farm-level advice by leveraging democratisation of AI, miniaturisation of technology allowing affordable deployment, and the development of massive communication and money exchange platforms. These platforms, including M-Pesa, allow rural extension to scale as a viable economic model enabling last-mile delivery in local languages.
Crop disease detection with the aid of Artificial intelligence models
In Ghana, one of the notable uses of artificial intelligence models has been the crop disease detection algorithm used by the Okuafo AI foundation.6
The Okuafo AI deployed using an Android application to detect pest infections and disease on crops. On the detection of crop illness, the application recommends scientifically proven courses of action with the use of an animated video. It also provides an option for farmers to contact regional crop authorities and report on the incidence of crop disease and pest outreaches.
Unmanned aerial vehicles
Aerobotics, a technology company based in Africa, has developed drones with the following use cases:
- The farm uses drones for aerial monitoring of orchards in South Africa. The farm also provides service offerings to crop insurance providers to enable the determine premiums and also access crop damages before effecting insurance proceeds.5
- The solution uses custom software to develop diagnostic maps created by processing the captured images during flight.
- The solution also enables the interpretation of the data to facilitate decision-making. This is through activities like measuring the health of the vegetation on the farms to make accurate inferences regarding the health of farmer crops.
Index-based insurance
Even though an estimated 60 per cent of the Sub-Saharan Africa population are smallholder farmers, less than 3 per cent of these farmers have crop insurance schemes. There are private sector initiatives that provide insurance solutions to smallholders.
In livestock value chains, notable public private partnerships have also occurred in some Commonwealth countries to provide agricultural index-based insurance to pastoralists.
Soil property detection with the use of machine learning
In many countries in the region, soil attribute mapping for farmers has not been done at a national level largely due to the cost and technical complexity involved. New digital images/maps of farmland have been developed by the African Soil Information Service that have the ability to tell precisely what is required to support better decision-making. Additionally, data about distribution of soil properties have been available since 2014. The maps are maintained by the Africa Soil Information Service (AfSIS), with input from scientists from International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF).
Livestock management with radio frequency chips
The Jaguza farm management operating platform developed in Uganda supports the management and visualisation of farm management data, displays animal information and also supports working routines to record all the important events that happen throughout the day as they happen.7 Some advantages that it offers include:
- An insemination, heat, vaccination, pregnancy check, or health treatment schedule that is well documented and can be used to accurately record every action in real time.
- Farmers can track the movement and health of animals using radio frequency chips.
- The solution also leverages the open-source library by google called tensor flow that facilitates the generation of automated recommendations for farm actions.
Case study: M–Omulimsa
M-omulimsa8 is an agricultural solutions provider that leverages a wide array of technologies, from mobile applications to a USSD service to provide a wide variety of digital solutions that among others include provision of index-based agricultural solutions to farmers, linking farmers to extension agents, connecting farmers to inputs providers and credit from a wide variety of lending entities.9
Value proposition summary
- USSD solution for farmers without internet connections.
- The solution offers an android application for android devices.
- The solution provides mobile-based extension services.
- The solution provides lending and alternative finance options for smallholder farmers in Uganda.
Product offerings
General outreach
M-Omulimisa is an agriculture technology company that leverages mobile phone technology to improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in Uganda. Although its service is available to all farmers across the country, the solution is mainly focused on Northern districts of Apac, Lira, Kole, Oyam, Alebtong, Dokolo, Agago and Nwoya. The solution offers a variety of ICT-based agriculture services including e-extension, agriculture insurance, agricultural loans and inputs distribution to support smallholder farmers to improve their access to information and services needed to sustainably increase productivity and income.
Response to Climate Variability and the National Extension Services Gap
Uganda like many Sub-Saharan African countries has been greatly impacted by climate change. By 2016,10 Uganda had been ranked by the International Institute for Sustainable Development in the 20 most vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change. The M-Omulimsa digital solution provides a USSD-based digital solution in the region that facilities provide access to weather index-based crop insurance to more than 13,314 registered crop farmers. The food and agriculture organisation recommends a farmer extension officer ratio of one to five hundred farmers. It should however be noted that Uganda lags critically behind this benchmark with an estimated 5,000 farmers per sub-county extension worker.11 In addition, with an estimated adult illiteracy rate of 30 per cent, the role of extension works in the region cannot be over-emphasised. M-Omulimsa steps into the extension services gap in the country by providing a USSD application to link rural farmers to the country to Government provided extension works that would others be unable to reach them.
Smallholder farmer impact
Since its establishment in 2016, M-Omulimisa has gone on to register over 20,000 farmers from 23 different districts in Uganda. The service has also received and responded to more than 12,000 questions in ten different local languages across the country. The service also has 325 registered extension officers but only about 100 are actively engaged in responding to farmers’ questions. The service has also commenced the distribution of inputs to farmers, by forming partnerships with seed distribution companies for example the NALWEYO SEED Company (NASECO) from which farmers can buy directly through the platform. This provides farmers with the opportunity to conveniently access affordable high-quality agricultural inputs.
Footnotes
1 In this classification, digital agriculture solutions enabling the provision of extension services by linking rural smallholder farmers to extension service providers solution providers are assessed differently from the solutions that provide direct pre-harvest crop advisory for farmers like access to information regarding planting routines, inputs and more.
2 Mpagalile, J. (2015). Firm-level logistics systems for the Agrifood sector in sub-Saharan Africa: Report based on appraisals in Cameroon, Ghana, Uganda and the United Republic of Tanzania. http://www.fao.org/3/i5017e/i5017e.pdf
3 Toulmin, C. (2005). Securing land and property rights in sub-Saharan Africa: the role of local institutions. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0264837708000811
4 CGIAR (2019). Plant village Nuru: AI For Pest & Disease Monitoring. https://bigdata.cgiar.org/inspire/inspire-challenge-2017/pest-and-disease-monitoring-by-using-artificial-intelligence/
5 https://www.aerobotics.com/ (accessed on July 14, 2021).
6 https://okuafofoundation.org/ (accessed on July 14, 2021).
7 https://jaguzafarm.com/support/ (accessed on July 14, 2021).
8 http://omulimisa.org/m-omulimisa/login (accessed on July 14, 2021).
9 Echeverría, D., A. Terton and A. Crawford (2016). Review of Current and Planned Adaptation Action in Uganda. https://www.iisd.org/publications/review-current-and-planned-adaptation-action-uganda
10 Dobermann, A. and A. Nelson (2013). Solutions for Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems. https://irp-cdn.multiscreensite.com/be6d1d56/files/uploaded/TG07-Agriculture-Report-WEB.pdf
11 Food rights Alliance Uganda (2019). State of food and nutrition we need.