An African woman with hoe in hand is the default symbol of agriculture in Africa, according to the late Calestous Juma, African academic and former Harvard Kennedy School professor. Mr. Juma used that image to convey the drudgery-filled farming that women on the continent face.

Women grow 70% of Africa’s food on smallholder farms, a task anchored by physical labour.

Now, with Africa’s population expected to double by 2050, the continent must ditch the hoe in favour of modern technology, which will complete the same tasks far more efficiently.

A transformation from small-scale subsistence farms to mechanised, more commercially viable farms is essential, say experts at the Ghana-based African Centre for Economic Transformation.

Currently, mechanisation levels on farms across Africa are very low, with the number of tractors in sub-Saharan Africa ranging from 1.3 per square kilometre in Rwanda to 43 per square kilometre in South Africa, compared with 128 per square kilometre in India and 116 per square kilometre in Brazil.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), a UN specialized agency that champions efforts to defeat hunger, Africa overall has less than two tractors per 1,000 hectares of cropland. There are 10 tractors per 1,000 hectares in South Asia and Latin America.

Without mechanized agriculture, productivity suffers drastically, lowering farmers’ earnings, notes the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, an organization funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundations that seeks to promote agricultural transformation and improve food security in Africa.

Africa currently spends a whopping $35 billion annually on food imports, according to the African Development Bank (AfDB), which projects that if the current trend continues, food imports could rise to $110 billion by 2050. Africa should be the breadbasket of the world, says AfDB president Akinwumi Adesina.

“Technologies to achieve Africa’s green revolution exist but are mostly just sitting on the shelves. The challenge is a lack of supportive policies to ensure that they are scaled up to reach millions of farmers,” Mr. Adesina adds.

The Maputo Declaration

African leaders in 2003 adopted the Maputo Declaration on Agriculture and Food Security, which requires countries to allocate at least 10% of public expenditure to agriculture with the goal of achieving 6% annual growth in the sector.

Yet 16 years later, only 13 countries have achieved at least 6% growth in the agricultural sector, stalling Africa’s dream of a food revolution. Those countries are Benin, Burundi, Cape Verde, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Togo.

In addition to the Maputo Declaration, the Malabo Montpellier Panel (MMP), a group of African and international experts, recommended in 2014 that African countries develop national agricultural mechanization investment plans as a critical step to increasing productivity.

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.

Successful mechanization will be key to tackling major challenges on the continent, the report concludes, from spiraling food import costs to rampant rural unemployment. The report recommends using public-private partnerships to develop local machinery industries to ensure affordable and appropriate technology is in use. It also recommends incentivizing the private sector to invest in mechanization through tax waivers and smart subsidies.

Finally, thanks to advances in renewable energy and digital technology, Africa can leapfrog the stages of technological development other regions have had to undertake, making its mechanization process both swift and extremely lucrative, according to the report.

Dr. Katrin Glatzel, programme leader of the MMP, who is also a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, a US-based food research organisation, points out that over half the fruits and vegetables produced in sub-Saharan Africa are lost, mostly because of inefficient postharvest handling and lack of processing equipment.

Mechanization, Ms. Glatzel posits, is not only for tilling land, it is also for planting, harvesting, processing and storage of produce.

“Increased levels of mechanization will boost social and economic processes in both on-farm and off-farm roles in rural communities, through reducing drudgery of farm work and improving yields,” Ms. Glatzel tells Africa Renewal.

“Not only will mechanization result in increased employment, it will also improve land management and productivity as well as the quality of the crops that are produced,” she adds.

To achieve these goals, farmers in developing countries must spend more on fertilizer, seeds and agrochemicals, says the FAO.

Some laudable initiatives

Some private sector initiatives have stepped into the breach created by unsuccessful state- and donor-led efforts to promote mechanization.

In Nigeria, Hello Tractor, a technology start-up, is a quickly expanding Uber-like programme that gives farmers temporary access to tractors on demand.

Farmers can request a tractor via a text message to an agent, who aggregates requests. A tech platform pairs available tractors with jobs, and then tracks each piece of equipment as it’s used.

With a tractor, a field that might take 40 days to prepare for planting by hand can be prepped in eight hours. It’s also cheaper to rent a tractor than to hire farm workers, says Jehiel Oliver, the 35-year-old founder of Hello Tractor. “It seems counterintuitive in these markets with relatively low cost of labour, but paying a human being to do this is still much more expensive than a tractor.”

Labor is also increasingly hard to find as more Nigerians move to cities and existing farmers get older. Using a tractor can help farmers plant fields in time for rain. Because planting with a tractor is also more consistent than planting by hand, it can also improve yields.

In Zambia, Rent to Own, a nongovernmental organisation founded in 2010, leases equipment such as pumps, presses, tractors, shellers and bicycles to farmers.

One of the advantages of mechanised agriculture is that it can potentially attract youth to farms and put a dent in Africa’s high youth unemployment, which accounts for about 60% of total unemployed.

The example of Zimbabwe’s young agripreneurs is instructive. Three years ago, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) loaned Gift Chawara, Shepard Karwizi and Pinnot Karwizi a planter and a sheller with which they started a business.

Their company is now offering shelling and planting services to almost 150 family farms in Mwanga village, northwest of the capital Harare.

They had graduated from an agricultural mechanization training programme managed by CIMMYT. Last season, the trio earned about $7,000 just from shelling over 300 tons of maize, according to CIMMYT.

But these young Zimbabweans could be outliers, asserts Frédéric Baudron, a senior systems agronomist at CIMMYT, who finds mechanization by smallholder famers in Zimbabwe still low.

CIMMYT’s mechanization training programme is implemented under the Farm Mechanization and Conservation Agriculture for Sustainable Intensification project and supported by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research. The project has benefitted over a hundred young people from Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.

Such efforts, replicated across Africa, could push the frontiers of agricultural productivity. But governments need to increase investments in the sector.

It’s time for the continent to rethink the hoe.

About the Author

Busani Bafana is a versatile development journalist, based in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Busani has more than 15 years of experience as a freelance journalist covering mainly environment, agriculture, food security, and climate change issues.

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How regenerative agriculture can increase Africa’s food production

Sustainable farming holds the key to economic prosperity

As global stakeholders work towards COP27, the next climate change conference, and accelerate efforts to confront the climate crisis, there has been increasing focus on “regenerative agriculture” – a term that is widely used but not always well understood.

How it is defined globally will have a major impact on how it is applied. To ensure that the global application accounts for African practices, it is imperative that we, as Africans, define regenerative agriculture for ourselves and share our local practices and indigenous knowledge with the world.

Regenerative agriculture describes an agriculture production system that aims to have lower, or even a net-positive, environmental impact. Regenerative practices thus avoid the key problems of highly industrialized agriculture production that damage soil health, including vast tracts of mono-cultivated land, chemical runoffs, overexploitation of water resources, and high chemical and hormonal residue levels in food.

How does this definition translate to the African context, particularly for the continent’s tens of millions of smallholder farmer families that are amongst the world’s most vulnerable to climate change?

“We believe that the solution lies in high-yielding, resilient, and adaptive practices (HYRAP) that constitute an African approach to climate-smart agriculture. High-yielding because the approach must contribute to feeding people and improving livelihoods in food systems. Resilient, because practices must be diversified to be able to bounce back and thrive under the the inevitable impacts of climate change,  and adaptive because weather patterns are increasingly unpredictable – an enormous challenge given the continent’s almost exclusive reliance on rainfall rather than irrigation”.

HYRAP is not new to Africa. African farmers already use these practices across the continent in soil systems, cropping systems, and integrated systems. Moving forward, focus should be placed on recognizing existence of these practices where they are in place, and further supporting their adoption and scaling.

Soil systems. Farmers are increasingly adopting no tilling and low tilling, where a crop is sown directly into soil that has been uncultivated or only slightly cultivated since the previous harvest. Some also incorporate crop residue as a mulch. Approximately 30% of South African farmers use this type of soil system.

Another example is water harvesting and irrigation. Although this practice is an effective way to reduce reliance on rain, application is hugely underexploited with only about 5% of agricultural land in Africa being irrigated. One approach that is becoming more prevalent is solar-powered irrigation systems, which have the benefit of delivering predictable amounts of water while avoiding the environmental challenges of conventional petrochemical powered systems.

Cropping systems. One prominent type of cropping system is crop rotation, the practice of growing different and diversified crops in succession on the same land to preserve the soil’s productive capacity and manage pest and disease.  The rotation of legumes such as beans with maize is one example of the remarkable practices that farmers have been using in various parts of Africa for centuries.  They understand that rotating crops improves soil quality, reduces pests and diseases, improves crop performance, and reduces dependency on pesticides. Similarly, intercropping (growing one crop next to another) improves farm biodiversity and soil quality, and helps farmers reduce their dependence on one crop.

Another common approach is to grow drought- and heat-resistant crops to maintain food and biomass production during drought conditions. Fonio millet, perhaps Africa’s oldest cultivated cereal crop, is grown in many parts of Western Africa, including Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, and Chad. This extremely fast-growing grain is highly resistant to drought conditions. It is also more nutrient-dense than alternative grains like wheat. In addition to providing food for human consumption, it is also a good source of fodder for livestock.

Integrated systems. This method deploys various mechanisms to control pests. Kenya, for example, has used pheromone traps to combat fruit flies in its mango crops. Other countries have made changes to their irrigation practices to reduce the chance of pest problems, such as avoiding too much water, which can increase root disease and weeds.

Agroforestry, which incorporates the cultivation of trees, is in use in Kenya and Zambia. It is also gaining traction across Africa through various initiatives such as the Grand African Savannah Green Up.

Increasing Adoption of HYRAP across Africa

The adoption of HYRAP has the potential to improve the livelihoods and resilience of farmers, processors, and consumers. It can also help restore natural systems which, in the case of Africa, are highly eroded from centuries of farming.

Pilots across the continent are actively exploring strategies that reward individual farmers who are implementing HYRAP with carbon finance enabled by mobile and fintech. Yet so far, small and mid-size food processing companies have generally been overlooked. These companies, which source from smallholder farmers and sell to African consumers, play an essential role in the food supply chain and deserve to be included in such initiatives.

It is also imperative that aggregators, logistics providers, processors, and distributors work across priority value chains to reduce post-harvest losses and invest in solutions that are both cost-effective and climate-friendly.

We recommend that public, private and social sector take the following actions to support the implementation of HYRAP.

Boost public spending that supports implementation of HYRAP

Tax incentives. National governments can demonstrate their commitment to HYRAP in their agricultural policies and budgets. This includes tax incentives for manufacturers, farmers, and processors who provide inputs for diverse, nutrient-dense, and sustainable foods. Governments could also impose taxes on imported food to encourage local production.

HYRAP extension. To enhance resilience and improve livelihoods, governments can enact  policies on HYRAP and promulgate them through the extension system. They can also codify local Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) that enhance resilience and natural outcomes of food production.

Subsidies. In addition, governments can create subsidies to reduce the cost of inputs needed for boosting the adoption of HYRAP across value chains. This is particularly important for heat, drought, and flood-tolerant seeds.

Facilitate cross-border and intercontinental trade of agricultural inputs and raw materials

To support production and inter-regional value chain development, it will be important for governments to ease the customs process, introducing one stop shops that recognize the perishable nature of agricultural goods.

Unlock access to capital

Priority sector lending. Banks can be required to direct higher portions of their loan books to agriculture and food systems investments. Priority sector lending in India, which requires banks to allocate 30% of their balance sheets to the rural economy, provides a good model to follow. This policy has been a significant contributor to growth of the Indian agriculture sector overall, with notable examples in ag-tech.

Blended finance. Philanthropic and donor capital can be used to reduce the risk of lending to agriculture and food companies, thereby enabling lower interest rates and borrowing costs. One such approach involves using first-loss guarantees (a mechanism where a third-party agrees to cover a certain amount of loss for lenders to reduce the risk) in conjunction with incentive payments. Aceli Africa, and the ABC Fund provide great examples.

This lower-cost capital should be even more accessible for farmers using HYRAP, and for food companies sourcing from them, to produce and distribute diverse, high-quality foods – those that are nutrient-dense, sustainable, affordable, and desirable. The companies providing the HYRAP inputs (such as solar powered irrigation, improved seeds and fertilizers, organic soil nutrients,  integrated pest management solutions and more) also need this financing to scale their operations.

Drive a shift in consumer demand.  Engaging media campaigns as well as purchasing incentives are needed to encourage consumers to purchase food that is HYRAP-compliant, thereby fueling demand and driving  sustainable change across priority value chains.  Such efforts can be supported by a variety of actors, including food companies, industry bodies, and governments.

The transition to HYRAP means a move to better productivity for small holder farmers in Africa—while addressing the needs of environmental sustainability.  Adopting HYRAP is not a choice – it is a necessity – if we truly wish to confront climate change.  The continent must become more self-sufficient and work towards not only food security but food abundance as well. We must ensure the adoption of practices that will deliver sufficient, sustainable, and nutritious food for Africa today – and for a future where the continent is a leading exporter of food worldwide.

The authors would like to thank Chris Mitchell and Biruh Demilew for their significant contributions to this piece.

About the authors

Ndidi Okonkwo Nwuneli is an expert on social innovation, agriculture and nutrition, entrepreneurship, and youth development, with over 25 years of international development experience. She is the founder of LEAP Africa, Nourishing Africa, and Changing Narratives Africa. She is also the co-founder of Sahel Consulting Agriculture & Nutrition Ltd and AACE Foods. She sits on the Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, and AGRA. Ndidi is the author of “Food Entrepreneurs in Africa: Scaling Resilient Agriculture Businesses” and “Social Innovation in Africa, a practical guide for scaling impact.”

Bogolo Kenewendo is a Global economist and Former Minister of Investment, Trade, and Industry in Botswana. Kenewendo is also a vocal advocate for sustainable trade, gender equity and the protection of children’s rights.  She is also a member of United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres’ High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation and group on Financing for Development, a member of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Future Council on Global Public Goods in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and a WEF Young Global Leader. She currently serves as the Africa Director & Special Advisor for UN Climate Change High-Level Champions, Managing Director of Kenewendo Advisory and Non-Resident Fellow with the Center for Global Development.

Zoë Karl-Waithaka is a Partner at BCG and co-leader of the firm’s African food system practice, with deep experience advising public, private, and social sector clients across the African continent. She focuses on growing African businesses and economies to achieve full potential and has led successful projects in countries including Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Côte d’Ivoire and Congo Brazzaville, among others.

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Sustainable farming holds the key to economic prosperity

Agroecology is the future for Africa’s farming youth

Agriculture holds the key to economic transformation for Kenya and the East African region. However, the challenge lies in practising sustainable agriculture to unlock its true value from food production to agro-processing.  

As the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) takes place in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, as a region and human race, we have many challenges ahead.

Some, are brought on by climate change, population pressure and political or financial instability within our economic and geopolitical space. Still, as a country and region, we have many unique advantages including political goodwill which, if used wisely, will allow us to build a robust agricultural economy.

Let me start by dealing with a favourite topic of mine, irrigation and water security. At Kakuzi, we have 19 dams which collect rainfall – allowing us to use the water for irrigation during dry season.

The critical part of our water security is not just the dam but the catchment itself.

If we don’t preserve the water catchment fields, our dams won’t fill with water, or they could silt up. In short, sustainable and secure irrigation requires that we sacrifice something, in this case, acres and acres of land, which act as water catchment areas.

These fields are preserved with natural habitat and managed to avoid soil erosion, bush clearance or overgrazing. In these fields, we must overcome the temptation to dig up the land and plant crops.

The next key challenge for agriculture after water is energy and not just the cost but also availability. In Kenya, our key export crop of tea requires energy to turn it from lush green leaves to dry tea; bear in mind that 4.5 kilos of green leaf converts to 1 kilo of black tea as the rest is water.  As we encourage farmers to grow more green tea leaves, we must also consider how to dry leaves.

In every tea-growing country, the energy for drying tea is a significant issue, whether it’s coal in India, gas in Bangladesh or fuel wood for us in East and Central Africa. Engineers have calculated the energy required, and it’s staggering. We must find sustainable solutions for this, as it’s not an easy or quick fix.

We all know the impact of energy prices on fertiliser, which is just another reason why we need to minimise our use wherever we can. Composting and mulching at Kakuzi to improve soil health and enhance soil fertility is a crucial component of our agricultural practices. Given that only 10 per cent of a macadamia nut is the edible kernel, a lot of biomass is available for conversion to energy or compost.

Teaching farmers sustainable agricultural techniques and when to apply different nutrients and in what quantities is part of what we do. Our online avocado academy ‘Kakuzi Avocademy’ is designed as an e-learning portal for farmers. Through the e-learning platform, we strive to advance shared prosperity values allowing smallholder farmers to learn and make the best crop husbandry decisions.

For many years now, I have been saying that we must explain how farmers can sell their fruit for the best value before we can tell them to plant an avocado tree.

Unfortunately, the fact is that the supply-demand equation for a perishable product such as avocados is a reality. Produce a product with limited marketability in a period of oversupply at your peril. This is precisely what happened in the avocado market earlier this year.

An oversupply of fruit in Europe through large Peruvian shipments and late European and North African production meant minimal marketing options for Kenyan smallholder fruit.

As I mentioned above, discerning customers choosing to eat a superfood such as macadamia or avocado want to know what they are eating and how it was produced. This is not because good Kenyan fruit is of substandard quality but simply because a lot of fruit from the country doesn’t have traceability credentials. If we as producers cannot demonstrate these traceability credentials, then high-value markets are limited and becoming more so.

We should also avoid the trap of thinking that emerging markets in the far east are less stringent than our traditional European markets. Sending substandard fruit to an emerging market can only depress demand, not enhance it.

Further up in the Rift Valley in the tea fields of Nandi and beyond, agricultural interest, mainly crop diversification, is also rising. The number of people seeking advice on avocado and macadamia potential in the region predominantly known for tea is growing.

Undoubtedly, this is the best time to get on the agribusiness side of things. As the name suggests, agribusiness means agricultural production for consumption and sale to raise much-needed financial resources. Like any other business, Agri-preneurs must carefully consider profit and loss fundamentals.

Considering profit and loss means engaging the investing community in the agricultural space to appreciate the role of credit access, mechanisation, technology and human resource management for efficiency.

Having been on the agricultural front my entire life, I can attest to this field-based industry’s value and potential to power rapid economic transformation. Kakuzi is an example of a leading agribusiness firm involved in commercial agricultural endeavours, including livestock rearing and agroforestry beyond our renowned avocado and macadamia production.

In Kenya, the Bottom-Up Economic Transformation Agenda 2022 – 2027 rightly notes that the agricultural sector has the highest growth multiplier effect on other economic sectors due to strong backward and forward linkages. There can be no denying that agriculture is our most globally competitive sector but getting it right is complex. Patience, long-term thinking and getting the fundamentals of sustainability, quality and traceability correct is the key.

Sometimes numbers tell the value of an agricultural enterprise better. For example, last year, notwithstanding the challenges of an “OFF” year cycle, Kakuzi PLC exported  Sh94 million worth of HASS avocados for our smallholder farmers. The previous ON-year cycle had seen us ship HASS Avocado cartons worth Sh152. 2 million for smallholder farmers.

In this venture geared at supporting smallholder farmers access quality international markets, we made payouts amounting to more than Sh31.4 million for the smallholder farmers from Kakuzi’s local community in Murang’a, Kirinyaga, Nyeri, Meru and Trans-Nzoia counties.

This is but one of the proof points that agribusiness is a viable economic avenue that can empower our farmers if we do it correctly.

However, we must remain alive to the vagaries of climate change as a risk factor to agricultural production and work towards building resilience.

Chris Flowers is the Kakuzi Kenya Managing Director. The company trades on both the Nairobi and London Stock Exchange, it engage in the cultivation, manufacture and marketing of a variety of agricultural products.  

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