DAKAR, May 5, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – How do you manage the trick of feeding
school children better and at a lower cost?
How do you count the number of mangoes on your farm so that you get a fair
price?
And what’s a clever-but-cheap way for a farmer to cut down his irrigation
bill?
Agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa may have the image of relentless toil and
low productivity, but experts say new tech is changing the picture.
Farmers, crop buyers and other sector professionals have started to harness
smart gadgets and crunch numbers to improve productivity, reduce costs and
smooth out wrinkles in the markets, they say.
– ‘Digital revolution’ –
“There’s a digital revolution unfolding in Africa,” says Pascal Bonnet, a
deputy director of CIRAD, the French Agricultural Research Centre for
International Development.
“Around the continent, there are excellent researchers in information
technology — digital agriculture is a real opportunity for qualified young
Africans.”
The idea of directly linking farmers to consumers, cutting out wholesalers
and stores is a familiar story in Europe and North America.
Awa Thiam, a 28-year-old telecoms engineer, is following suit in her native
Senegal.
The company she founded, Lifantou, connects school canteens with farming
cooperatives with the help of big data.
“There’s a huge need for this,” Thiam said, showcasing her work at an agri-
tech conference in Dakar last month.
“Today, between 25 and 50 percent of the cost of school meals goes to
intermediaries, but schools have limited budgets. If you shorten the supply
chain, canteens can bring down the cost of meals and offer the children more
varied menus.”
Her one-stop platform draws on a databank of crop production and schools to
match potential demand with supply.
It group-purchases to lower the cost for schools and in a final flourish
organises the transport of the goods, with operations monitored in real time.
– Counting by mobile –
A project called Pix Fruit, meanwhile, aims to help farmers who have until
now estimated their mango crop by counting the fruit on a bunch of trees and
then extrapolating for the whole plantation.
This rough-and-ready method has considerable room for error.
Emile Faye, a French researcher in digital agro-ecology who works for Pix
Fruit, says the margin for mistakes could be as much as a factor of 10.
A purchaser, for instance, could pay the price for two tonnes of mangos
while taking delivery of 20 tonnes from the farmer, although errors may go
either way.
Pix Fruit’s alternative uses advanced modelling software to produce a more
precise count of the crop.
Using a smartphone, the farmer takes photos of a selection of trees in his
fields.
Fruit-recognition technology then calculates the likely overall harvest,
drawing on a databank compiled with the help of drones that also includes
information on climate, soil and administrative constraints.
That way, farmers learn the true worth of their crop, while wholesalers and
price negotiators have a better take on the risk of glut or undersupply.
The system, jointly developed by CIRAD and the Senegalese Institute for
Agricultural Research, could be extended to coffee, lychees and citrus
fruits.
– Market info –
That the smart phone should play such a central role is no surprise.
The advent of the mobile helped Africa to leapfrog the cost of installing
landlines, spurring innovative use, from ride-sharing to money transfer.
The pioneering work is now spreading into the rural world.
The continent’s third-most downloaded apps, according to Africa.com, is
Esoko, which collects and shares crop prices, provides weather information
and farming tips, and arranges payment via a mobile money system.
It operates in Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Malawi,
Madagascar, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
The Widim Pump, made by a Dakar firm called Nano Air, is a box controlled
by SMS messages that a farmer sends to manage his irrigation system.
The savings are substantial, even for poor peasant families, says Oumar
Basse, a 27-year-old engineer and the company’s co-founder.
“There’s no more need for the farmer to walk several kilometres (miles)
every day or use up fuel or hire someone to monitor the pumps.
“He can switch on the water or turn off the supply using his mobile phone.”
With 12 employees after two years in operation, Nanoair has sold 250 Widim
systems and received orders from Morocco and Zambia.
Basse has also founded another firm helping with handling deliveries and
after-sales services.