Disrupting Food Systems: Is Your Tech Fit for Africa?

Today is just another day on the African Savannah.?

Farmers are rapidly adopting organic fertilizers as people become more aware of the ecological effects of chemical fertilizers. Strategies for alternative nutrient sources to increase fertilization efficiency are crucial in achieving agricultural sustainability.

While the World slept, tractor-steering technology and access to advice became connected and cloud-based. Suddenly mobile phone providers are as valuable as the manure.

What do you truly know about the vast continent of Africa? What is your educated theory about Africa? What are you optimizing for?

This year, we ask innovators targeting Africa a sincere question:?“Is Your Tech Fit for Africa?”

Which Africa?

To spell out the enormity of the challenge, let’s start by correcting the size perspectives. Malawi, at 45747 square miles, is 5.7x (an area the size of Wales). By contrast, Europe is 2.306 million square miles (~50.4x), the United States is 3.719 million square miles (~81.3x), and Africa is 11.72 million square miles (~256.2x).

Can your tech survive the subtleties and idiosyncrasies of a dynamic, partially connected, and underpowered African environment?

Show us! How do we bridge the practicability and familiarity gaps? How do we use data to promote the theories into relevant practice?

Identifying problems must lead to actionable insights. How do we shape the tech to fit the Africa we are moving to the centre of the World?

I was asked why I was comfortable switching technologies and industries a while back.?

My off-the-cuff answer was,?“I come from a poor country. I cannot afford to specialize!”?

It took me a long time to realize the unbridled honesty of that statement.

It is not that I set out to switch between industries or specialties. It is just the accident of the recruitment lottery and the nomadic nature of consultancy contracts that served my quest for worthwhile challenges. Time is not the only thread that strings the instances together.

I was optimizing for a different problem of remaining relevant in a world that doesn’t have plenty. The observer existed in a world that, in their lifetime, has invariably provided adequately. In that World, the question of materiality is settled mainly during the career-selection phase in high school. They were trying to chronicle the cumulative journey along several necessary tangents formed over time.

A dichotomy of perspectives rooted in equally relevant lived experiences.

I remember visiting several large farms, including tea, coffee, and sugarcane estates, with my parents when I was young. The enormity of the operations never really seemed reachable. The only thing coming out was that big things required many talents to work together.

On the other hand, there were well-publicized events where the then-president of Malawi, His Excellency Ngwazi Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda, would visit beautifully tended maize fields. While the oratory surrounding the visits was predominantly single-dimensional, they seemed relatable. These were everyday folk.

For most of us, at that point, nobody had let us in on the secret that Malawi was classed as a “poor” country. The widely accepted concept of poverty was not relatable in the face of this apparent abundance. We were looking at different things!?

Riches were prescribed simply as a house that didn’t leak and having food on the table - irrespective of its nutritional value.

Young people growing up today tend to break out of these?“captive community”?mindsets. Unlike previous generations, we have enabled them to explore beyond their immediate neighborhoods. They are aware of the local issues and have a liberal approach to participating in events that shape their global umwelten.

Experts reckon there is a need to intervene to make Africa’s agrarian economies sustainable, given the threat of worsening food shortages due to reduced plot sizes owing to intergenerational land fragmentation and increasing vulnerability to the effects of climate change. In Malawi, nearly 80% of the population is employed in agriculture.

The neighborhood the Malawian youth are growing up in may still be “poor”; however, happiness and satisfaction are primarily defined according to a different metric.?

In their isolated reference frame, the local middle class can afford to dream. That’s a growing segment of society. They demand different things.

On the other hand, in this isolated echo chamber, the definition of ethics and virtues can be questionable in the global context. Discontinuities exist. The most dangerous ones usually have external enablers and corrupt custodians at the core.

In an ideal world, ours would not be to impose global standards. However, we must always care about what gets done in our names! Turning a blind eye does not absorb us of the culpability.?

We must embrace the diversity of realities and empower the locals to improve their capabilities to contribute to solving local and global problems.

A group of African and international experts at the Malabo Montpellier Panel (MMP) in 2014 recommended that African countries develop national agricultural mechanization investment plans as a critical step to increasing productivity [8].

In a 2014 article entitled?“The Next Breadbasket”?in National Geographic, Joel K. Bourne recounts a Mozambiquan lady and her children’s?experience with the introduction of mega-farms and mechanization [7]. The passage goes, and I quote:

“She never saw the big tractor coming. First it plowed up her banana trees. Then her corn. Then her beans, sweet potatoes, cassava. Within a few, dusty minutes the one-acre plot near Xai-Xai, Mozambique, which had fed Flora Chirime and her five children for years, was consumed by a Chinese corporation building a 50,000-acre farm, a green-and-brown checkerboard of fields covering a broad stretch of the Limpopo River Delta.”

Tech is but one aspect of the whole. We must build mutually beneficial partnerships with local communities. Enablement must always accompany duty of care.

We need to agree on a robust ethical framework for introducing tech in an environment where the locals’ rights may not be recognized or respected.

How do we guarantee equity and inclusivity in creating African mega-farms?

Most protocols and policies initiating African mega-farms and mechanization do not explicitly enforce ethical constraints.

The current frameworks are vague on the specifics of partnerships with the local communities. In other words, they shy away from addressing obvious future conflicts.

According to several respected reports, the World’s fastest-growing populations will be in the Middle East and Africa [6]. The current rush in Africa is arable land and access to waterways.?

The California water crisis should serve as a cautionary tale [5]!

In 2011, commenting on the Policy considerations for?the?security implications of climate change in the Sahel Region, a paper by the OECD’s Sahel and West Africa Club Secretariat submitted:

“Although theories of scarcity-induced insecurity have been around for centuries, technological innovations, human ingenuity,?adaptation, and growth in international trade over the past decades appeared to have overcome many traditional scarcities. Recently, however, these have resurfaced amongst other trends, with the effects of climate change being seen to be posing new threats to security and development [4].”

According to the United Nations, Ethiopia’s food shortages and hunger crisis from 1983 to 1985 led to an estimated 1 million famine deaths [3],[4]. One wonders what the actual number of excess deaths was due to the overlapping civil conflict which weaponized access to resources.

In a report in 2018, the MMP listed 12 African countries, including Ethiopia, Malawi, Mali, Morocco, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Zambia, as having demonstrated strong growth in mechanized agriculture and consequently achieved higher output [8].

While this change represents an appetite for more efficient methods, several questions about the basis of the relative difference, how this moved the watermark closer to the nominal target, and overall sustainability remain open.

Where food systems are concerned, as we collectively move Africa to the centre of the World, we must architect and chronicle practicable and defensible journeys from dreams to reality.

My nieces and nephews living in Malawi keep reminding me that I promised them a robot.?(I must have been half-asleep or jet-lagged on one of my regular visits! I swear!)?

As any dutiful uncle teaching the fairness of the World would, I have tried to wiggle out of it by pointing out all the bog-standard excuses, including the frequent and lengthy power blackouts. They are not oblivious to the reality of those excuses; they just have packaged creative solutions for each one of them.?

They embrace the challenges of their environment with fierce and admirable innocence, unencumbered by external noises — their threshold for adapting to the seemingly impossible breaches my miracle line.?

They don’t see these as limiting factors. They will be the first to tell you, with authority, what needs to change for their generation. They have a theory of their tomorrow, and they own it.

To them, it’s not about a lack of something but rather the hunger for more. They demand to be served accordingly. These are the builders of the tomorrow you and I dream of. How does your tech help their dreams? How does it enable them?

However, please wait a moment before you appoint them as your regular advisors! It would be irresponsible for me not to tell you that it was impossible to unpack my career for them. That question about my career was fair, after all. What followed was a lengthy, animatedly funny, and educational conversation where I was summarily informed that I was an electrician. You would be convinced too!

“I come from a poor country. I cannot afford to specialize!”?

That was true back then. Today, success in Africa is beginning to align with specific competitive verticals around agriculture technologies.?

Observe. Analyze. Make a difference.

As children growing up in Africa, my siblings and I were lucky enough to have access to a regular National Geographic magazine subscription. The necessary global view to an otherwise-local education.?

Between that subscription, the Economist, NewScientist, and memberships to several libraries, including the British Council Library, the National Library Services, Malawi Institute of Education Library, and Chancellor College Library, we couldn’t claim we didn’t have curated windows to the World. We could escape the mind-numbing propaganda and rhetoric of the day.

Back then, complex questions involved researching the topics in libraries.

Nowadays, the?“LinkedWhatsInstaTwittFace”?has pre-baked answers to complex questions. We are left to vote on science and logic without accountability for the risk of bias or manipulation.

Through the magic of international pen pal programs, I learnt about snippets of fascinating Cherokee traditions and life on a Canadian ranch. My pen pal was a Canadian girl of Cherokee heritage whose grandparents owned a ranch she loved visiting.?

Understanding common differences is a deliberate act.?

Access does not always result in useful education.

“London, New York, and Africa!?”

Both parents being science teachers, objective reality was in abundance. Everything had a logical explanation.

Our bookshelves (plural) always had new volumes added frequently and formed part of the focal point of the living room.?

Needless to say, I never played football!?

Of course, that is not entirely true. I participated in two games that proved definitively that I was terrible at kicking and chasing this piece of soccer leather! Even when they excused my lack of chasing skills and made me a goalie for a moment, I got bored of standing and waiting for the chasers to involve me, so I created my own entertainment, which was contrary to the objective of their chase! I broke football.?

(It?seems?football has a long memory! These two games were decades apart and in different countries. I suppose the football-loving lot needed that much time and geographical separation to recover from the dreadfulness of the first game.)?

It was a separate enterprise from what tickled my brain. It was not enough of a distraction between book chapters.

I developed a?“love-sort-of-haunted”?relationship with magazines!

I was fascinated by National Geographic’s?“people-of-the-world”?articles. The authors would go out and create feature pieces of some undiscovered or underserved remote communities in some parts of the World. In the late 80s, the face in the glossy cover pictures of many magazines and newspapers looked a lot like mine due to the famine in North Africa.?

The story of Africa was reduced to these crisp pictures of evidently malnourished children around my age to highlight their plight.?

That was the gruesome reality of the day.

My child’s mind, looking for good and hope in the World, I would always come back to these articles and search for at least a solitary smile - that lonely beacon of hope! [3].

Whether it was from a momentary reprieve, I cannot speculate. On the rare occasion, you would find that desolate face beaming hope back at you, momentarily oblivious of the prevailing quandary.

Africa has 11.72 million square miles! There are bound to be contradictions of realities!?

On the one hand, we had the lived experience of stories of bumper harvests and abundance (luck, logic, or embellished truth, notwithstanding). On the other, we had untold suffering from famine and conflicts.

These are the concurrent faces of Africa! Complex answers to complex questions!

Even at that age, I never had the patience for parroting what I was told. I refused to accept package answers to complex questions.?

I developed an innocent childhood theory that the differences were perhaps because it took someone from outside your frame of reference to inform you that your perspective is warped.

The logic went like this: you need that external reference to know what was missing or what could be in a closed system.

Relative poverty or deprivation measures the breadth of the chasm between these reference frames. It is usually expressed in terms of money.

I outgrew that theory. My version of Africa is much bigger and much more nuanced! My extra-academic education has touched upon the nature of greed and conflict. I think I understand the cyclic effects of climate change too.

I realized much later that while these stories served a specific noble purpose, they also helped to minimize and provide the wrong type of education about the African experience to the World.?

Change the lens!

Most importantly, what informed collective theories can we advance to actionable efforts?

Know Thy Data!?

We need to define our understanding of poverty in terms of capability deprivation and enable activities that enhance the population’s economic entitlements, including making necessary finance available to economic agents.

Let’s start here to unlock the continent’s vast and diverse resources.

A food system is a path food follows from the point of production to the plate, including all actors and infrastructure. In Africa, the food system has many facets that look different under different lenses.

Like anywhere else, the path is fraught with risks and has many prospects.

It is a series of opportunities to innovate.?

Africa is set to become the cradle of the World’s food system. Visit the organic section of any high-end shop, and you will begin to speculate why.

Unlike those?“recently”?discovered communities of those days, Africa has moved a lot further from zero.?

However, it is also myopic to think that Africa will singularly achieve this nirvana in the short term.

Africa is on the move and steadily so. However, it needs the necessary scaffolding driven by the desire to do global good and construct a new narrative instead of reactive policies to a past already lived, which only serves mediocrity.

The global market segments for agritech are based on specific product categories: farm tractors, ploughing and cultivation machinery, planting and fertilizing machinery, harvesting machinery, haying machinery, and parts and attachments.

These categories usually require a substantial capital investment upfront. Very few companies specifically design products that serve price-conscious developing markets.?

The expectation that these markets and capabilities will somehow organically catch up with the need is rather ill-advised. The current distribution strategies for technology introduction do not pay attention to competitive costs specific to Africa.

In 2017, Dr Akinwumi Adesina, speaking as the President of the African Development Bank, cautioned:

“Africa’s annual food import bill of $35 billion, estimated to rise to $110 billion by 2025, weakens African economies, decimates its agriculture and exports jobs from the continent. Africa’s annual food import bill of $35 billion is just about the same amount it needs to close its power deficit [1].”

Dr?Adesina added, “To rapidly support Africa to diversify its economies and revive its rural areas, we have prioritized agriculture. We are taking action. The Bank has committed $24 billion towards agriculture in the next 10 years, with a sharp focus on food self-sufficiency and agricultural industrialization [1].”

The ADB is not the only bank pumping funds into the African agriculture sector. How do we convert these into practical solutions??

How can we translate this commitment into actionable change?

In 2021, research commissioned by Microsoft in collaboration with Africa Practice believed Africa’s agricultural sector is set for exponential growth in the coming decade. They reported, “With a projected value of USD1 trillion by 2030, the continent is poised to become the global centre of agritech solutions and has also seen rapid growth in e-agriculture solutions [2].”

“It’s expected that as the continent’s middle class rapidly grows, they will drive increased demand for fresh produce, while the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) could boost intra-African trade by 49 percent. Through increased investments in inputs, storage facilities, and irrigation infrastructure, Africa is expected to increase its agricultural output by up to three times by 2030 [2].”

That’s the Africa we have today. Is Your Tech Fit for Africa?

Conflict of Interest:?The context of the Disrupting Food System series is primarily a data-driven commentary on first-hand experiences researching, implementing large-scale socio-technical solutions to locally-relevant issues, and venturing into large-scale commercial Regenerative Precision Agriculture, trading,?and ethical off-taking in Malawi, Tanzania, and South Africa.

Precision Agriculture integrates Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things (IoT) devices to adjust for many variables affecting yield. On the other hand, regenerative agriculture is a conservation and rehabilitation approach to food and farming systems.