When Agriculture Meets Technology and Journalism

TechInAfrica – Technology, mainly in developing regions like Sub-Saharan Africa, serves as an apparatus to boost the nations’ growth in multiple aspects. Namely in economy, transportation, communication, and along with it, food production. So far, this urgency in the major agriculture sector isn’t even overlooked by both tech startups and the nations’ government. The essential premise is to build a better, more feasible agriculture scene with hopes to address this problem towards the staggering poverty-stricken areas in rural Africa.

Malabo Montpellier Panel, a group of 17 international agriculture experts focusing to continuously evolve Africa’s food production market, held a forum discussion in Kigali, Rwanda at June 25^th earlier last month along with government officials and policy makers. Digitalization of African agriculture was regarded as the forum’s main topic of discussion—furthermore, state-owned and private-owned institution are expected to implement innovations, manifesting as a key pillar for Africa to achieve higher heights in the fields of agriculture. Motivated by the worrying statistics of poverty and hunger across the continent, Malabo Montpellier Panel deemed that technology must serve as the catalyst for such sector to grow exponentially in return.

On a lighter side note, Malabo Montpellier Panel has extensively published their journals—named Byte to Byte—about the food-related problems in various African countries, namely Rwanda, Ivory Coast, and Kenya. This series of case of studies infers to many aspects which can correlate with their goal of making agriculture more effective. Even elements that are often overlooked, such as internet network accessibility or macroeconomics, would be analyzed and disclosed in Byte to Byte reports. You can, for one, check out their analysis on Rwanda’s agriculture sector by clicking this link.

African startups are also emerging as quick as they can be, with some even ranging on the same level as veteran companies—like Uber and AirBnB. What differs these African startups is that they’re not only in it for the fortune and wealth, but are also genuinely looking to solve the problem that’s been drawing back multiple layers of societies. Various founders and CEOs of these startups were there to see the issues with their own very eyes or even experience them in their childhoods—and this serves as more than a stimulus for the newly-formed companies to ultimately address such local, regional, and even continental disputes. Needless to say, referred disputes also covers the issue of food production, in which the matter is also substantial for cutting-edge technology application.

Source: mamopanel.org