Thin Lei Win

Since Marie Chantal Akingeneye lost her only cow to an unknown illness, she has no source for manure for her fruits and vegetables – but she hopes a new phone app could help.

After attending a training by the United Nations, which developed the technology, she thinks the app will help keep her goats and pigs healthy and modernise her farm for her six-year-old son to take over.

“It tells farmers about symptoms and diseases that attack livestock,” the 28-year-old single mother said, sitting outside her home in northern Rwanda.

“The cow died because I didn’t know it was sick. Now I don’t have much fertiliser.”

Donors and African governments hope such tools could lure youths to farming as the continent struggles with rising hunger, unemployment and migration.

Africa has the world’s youngest population – 60 percent of its 1,2 billion people are under 25 – but only 3 million jobs are created for some 12 million young people who enter the workforce each year, the African Development Bank says.

While developed nations turn to robots, blockchain, artificial intelligence and machine learning to solve agricultural challenges, simple, mobile phone-based offerings could produce great results in Africa, experts say.

The free app, which was created by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), provides information on weather, market prices for crops and producing and conserving nutritious foods.

“Digital technologies like these can make farming more interesting,” said Andy Jarvis, research director at Colombia-based International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT).

“They could be transformational for Africa. A simple text to a farmer just to say, ‘The weather outlook for the next three days is this’ can fundamentally change what they do.”

Experts say it is becoming increasingly important for farmers to access up-to-date information as climate change brings erratic weather, making traditional knowledge on planting seasons unreliable.

Daniel Nshimiyimana, a Rwandan university graduate who turned his grandparents’ neglected land into a thriving farm producing bananas, maize and beans, is one of 50 farmers who have been testing the app since late 2016.

“The app helps by telling me about the quality of seeds I have to plant, the quantity of fertiliser to use, the distance between the trees,” he said.

“One bunch of (my) bananas used to weigh 30 kilos. Now they are 40, 50 kilos,” Nshimiyimana said proudly, pointing at the trees planted on a precipitously steep slope.

Still, he is a rarity in a continent where the average age of farmers is 60, according to the FAO, and agriculture is seen as unprofitable back-breaking work.

But a growing number of tech-savvy young Africans are taking an interest in developing products to modernise farming, from solar-powered devices that measure soil conditions and optimise water and fertiliser use to tractors that analyse data.

“Normally people have the wrong perception of Africa -a all the wars and political problems,” said Mwila Kangwa, head of Zambian start-up AgriPredict, which developed an app, to help farmers identify diseases and pests.

“But we’re 54 (countries). If we can come together with these technologies and see how we can improve agriculture, Africa will have a whole new face.”

But technology is not “a silver bullet” and its viability is uncertain when it is donor-funded, said Worlali Senyo of agri-tech company, Farmerline, which created a free app, CocoaLink, to encourage young Ghanaians to farm.

“If the funding runs out, it’s going to be like other interventions that failed,” said Senyo, a senior consultant with the company, which developed CocoaLink with the support of the US chocolate maker Hershey Co.

“The best would be to work with local companies to find more sustainable approaches.”

It will take time for technology to revolutionise Africa’s agriculture, CIAT’s Jarvis said, as farmers tend to be conservative with poor digital literacy. It’s not like Google or IBM jump on this, create a major product, roll it out, with massive marketing. That’s not how innovation works in those geographies and communities,” he said.

And then there are things technology cannot help.

“I’m 29 and still not married,” sighed graduate farmer Nshimiyimana looking at the large, new house he had built. –  Thomson Reuters Foundation.