The Digitisation of African Agriculture Report (2018-2019) by the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) has disclosed that Africa realised €127 million from agriculture due to increase in the use of digital technologies, innovations and data.
According to the report, advisory and information services accounted for €54 million of the €127 million revenue with market linkages raking in €39 million, financial access €21 million and supply chain management, €9 million.
The report, which was conducted in Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Senegal and the Sahel region, was launched at a news conference ahead of the African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) 2019.
The Digitisation of African Agriculture Report, which aims to create awareness on the contributions of digitalisation to agriculture, disclosed that the increment of agriculture revenue was achieved by 33 million registered smallholder farmers and pastoralists across the continent who used D4Ag (digitalisation for agriculture) solutions.
These solutions include advisory and information services, supply chain management, market linkages, macro agric-intelligence, financial access with 22.6 million farmers registering for advisory and information services.
The report noted that 390 D4Ag solution providers played an important role in the revenue increase as they focused on digitalization of agriculture by linking all the players – farmers, agro-dealers, financial institutions, governments, development partners to FMCGs and produce aggregators.
Speaking
on the report, Michael Hailu, Director of CTA, called on African countries to
go all out to take advantage of digitalisation and harness its full potential.
He hinted that although Ghana was one of the countries making progress, there
was still a lot of work to be done. He encouraged the countries to scale up
efforts by collaborating with all stakeholders in the sector and creating
opportunities for all.
Chidinma Nwagbara
