The Digitalisation of African Agriculture Report, 2018-2019

Digitalisation for agriculture (D4Ag) can be a game changer in supporting and accelerating agricultural transformation across Africa, explains the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Co-operation (CTA) in its Digitalisation of African Agriculture Report, 2018-2019 published in June 2019.

The report is meant to serve as a barometer for the current state of D4Ag in Africa. The authors define D4Ag and establish a common language for the sector. Moreover, they show how far the sector has advanced as at 2019 and offer their perspective on where the sector will go in the next 3–5 years. They also shed light on what it will take to further unlock the potential of the sector and explore the roles of different stakeholders.

Over the last three years, the development of D4Ag solutions has gained momentum, says the report. As at 2019, there are at least 390 distinct, active D4Ag solutions across the continent. Nearly 60 per cent of these were launched in the last three years, and approximately 20 per cent were launched since 2018. 

The solutions span five major use cases: advisory services, market linkages, financial access, supply-chain management, and macro agricultural intelligence. Additional use cases include D4Ag data intermediaries that focus on multiple downstream solutions. Furthermore, the amount of bundling is increasing – over 50 per cent of active solutions combine more than one use case.

According to the report, the sector has been growing at about 44 per cent per annum over the last three years in terms of the number of farmers reached, most of them living in East Africa. D4Ag solutions have already registered over 33 million smallholder farmers and pastoralists across the continent.

Although D4Ag solutions are present in at least 43 of 49 sub-Saharan African countries, over half of the solutions are headquartered in East Africa and nearly two-thirds of registered farmers across all solutions are based in East Africa, with Kenya leading the way. Similarly, the largest 20 solutions account for nearly 80 per cent of farmer registrations.

(CTA/ile)
 

Read more and download the report: https://www.cta.int/en/digitalisation-agriculture-africa