Breaking the code: Putting African farmers in the middle of agricultural innovation

At the just-concluded Africa Food Systems Forum in Dakar, Senegal, one message stood out: the future of African agriculture is increasingly being shaped by technology. Entrepreneurs and scientists are building platforms, deploying sensors, and developing algorithms to transform food production. Yet a critical truth is often overlooked — technology is only as valuable as the solutions it delivers to its users.

For farmers, who remain the backbone of Africa’s food system, the true measure of innovation is not its novelty, but its ability to ease daily challenges and improve livelihoods.This lesson influenced my journey in digital agriculture through the experience of working with FAO, ITU and AGRA and regional stakeholders.

While agricultural technology (AgTech) has great potential to raise productivity, connect farmers to markets, and improve resilience, I have also seen promising solutions collapse because they were not designed keeping farmers' reality in mind.

The Human Side of Innovation

Consider Achieng, a western Kenyan smallholder farmer. She was given access to a mobile application that gave her weather forecasts and planting schedules. But she was not able to access it consistently. The app was in English only, her village had patchy electricity for charging phones, and poor internet connections meant frequent update failures. For her, the promise of digital agriculture was out of reach.

Her experience is not exceptional. Nation to nation, across the continent, good technology is going unused because it is inaccessible, too costly, or not relevant to the daily use of the farmer.

Take the example of CropIn, which is one of the best-marketed African intelligent agriculture platforms. Growing sophisticated AI-powered farm management, traceability, and weather advisory services, in theory, the potential is massive—businesses and governments use it for monitoring thousands of hectares, ensuring compliance, and maximizing yields.

Yet, for the majority of smallholder farmers, especially women and the young, the platform has been less than accessible.

With prohibitively expensive adoption costs, simplicity, and dependence on reliable internet connectivity, the majority of smallholders have been unable to effortlessly integrate CropIn into their daily agriculture. As such, while large agribusiness companies enjoy the benefits, the same farmers who stand most to gain from digitalization are still shut out.

This example identifies a larger trap: that solutions are designed without regards to local contexts—cost, literacy, connectivity, and trust.  They don't need fancy dashboards; they need affordable, accessible, and usable tools that are compatible with their environment.

The issue is compounded by the youth-farming gap. Young innovators do not have contact with farm life when they design tools. Removed from actual production issues, they risk developing shiny but unusable technologies that farmers will not or cannot use. 

Building an Ecosystem that Serves Farmers

In order to fill this gap, we must break from technology-dictating and dictate with farmers, instead. What I have learned is that adoption depends on an environment in which technology is an enabler, but not the center. Some of the basics of that approach are:

Learning "Why" before "How." Start by fully grasping the specific challenges farmers are currently facing in their local context. What are their main obstacles to productivity, market access, and resilience? For example, in Ethiopia’s highlands, low yields due to soil degradation are a key issue, while in Nigeria’s savannahs, market access is a primary barrier. Only then do we examine the ways technology can be a relevant part of the solution, ensuring it addresses farmers’ unique needs.

Building bridges, not walls. That typically means extending existing mobile phone coverage, developing local language solutions, and employing visual and voice interfaces that bridge literacy divides.Cheap, adaptable tools — such as voice-based services, SMS platforms, or local-language apps — bring technology within reach of those who are systematically excluded.

Practical value-chain linkage. Farmers need solutions where pain is most intense. Solar-powered mobile grain dryers in Rwanda cut post-harvest losses for maize by 20% after two seasons. Mobile-facilitated fertilizer subsidies in Ghana increased input use by 30%, enhancing productivity and household incomes.

Promoting integrated solutions: Farmers do not work in silos. They need access to credit, quality inputs, stable markets, and the right advisory services. The best AgTech solutions are those that take these disjointed needs and integrate them into a single, end-to-end, and usable platform, rather than providing piecemeal point solutions. Digital technologies also need to transcend piecemeal quick fixes. Farmers need end-to-end platforms connecting them to credit, inputs, extension advice, and markets.

Trust, Literacy, and Feedback: Technology adoption is divided equally between people and trust and devices and platforms. Farmers need to believe that technology will actually make their lives better. They require:

    • Building digital literacy and trust. Extension officers and local leaders provide training programs that give farmers the skills and confidence necessary to make efficient and sustainable use of the tools.

    • Iterative co-design through feedback. Farmers shape the optimal solutions, which evolve and improve over time. With AGRA and Microsoft's rollout of AgriBot, an advisory chatbot, smallholder feedback had an impact on its development — expanding covered crops and adding local services. AgriBot reached over 50,000 farmers in Kiambu and Embu -two counties in Kenya  within a year, demonstrating the power of co-design.

New Frontiers of AgTech

The future frontier of agricultural innovation offers opportunities to transform African agriculture — if designed inclusively.

Artificial intelligence-based pest detection technologies piloted in Uganda reduced crop losses by up to 40%, providing farmers with real-time advisory services, Blockchain traceability platforms are giving Kenyan coffee farmers access to high-end export markets. Village-level soil laboratories and low-cost, moisture-proof storage buildings are allowing farmers to maximize yields and reduce post-harvest losses.

But such technologies must be scaled equitably. Cooperatives, farmer organizations, and supportive policies can split the costs, spread the risk, and enhance bargaining capacity, so even the smallest farmers can benefit.

A Call to Action

In a bid to make African agriculture thrive in the digital era, we must shift collectively from designing for farmers to designing with farmers. This will require collective dedication across stakeholders:

    1. Policymakers need to craft farmer-centric digital policies, reduce tax levies on digital inputs, and invest in rural technology infrastructure.

    2. Investment decisions by donors need to be made on demonstrable success of farmer impact, not theoretical potential.

    3. Innovators have to co-design with farmers from the start so that technology becomes meaningful, accessible, and omnipresent across value chains.

Unlocking Africa's Agricultural Future

AgTech has the power to transform lives, ensure food security, and unlock Africa's potential for economic growth. All this is, however, dependent on one key fact: human beings must be kept at the center of innovation.

By rooting technology in farmers' needs, languages, and daily realities, Africa can leapfrog bright ideas to practical, effective solutions. On the continent's smallest farms to its largest cooperatives, the true worth of AgTech will be known not in lines of code but in how much it drives the men and women who feed us all.

The author, Nixon Mageka Geheo, is a senior consultant on digital transformation & development.