Technology is profoundly and rapidly changing the way food is produced. In Africa, a growing cohort of entrepreneurs is working on transforming agriculture through digitalization.
These technological advancements are unfolding to meet the needs of small farmers, for the vast majority of Africa’s farmers are smallholder farmers. In fact, smallholder farms account for 80 per cent of farms in sub-Saharan Africa. Small farmers in Africa face a wide array of challenges to increasing productivity such as the decline of manual labor availability and young people’s growing interest in other career paths.
Hello Tractor, a Nigerian company is seeking to fill this labour gap and make agriculture a more appealing career by integrating innovative technology into African farmers’ daily lives.
The Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA), a joint institution of the AVP Group of States (Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific) and the European Union recently released The Digitalisation of African Agriculture Report. This report provides an overview of the technology landscape in African agriculture and it discusses challenges, predictions, and next steps. Hello Tractor is a featured company in the report where it is cited as the “best-established example” of a sharing-economy business model combining with technology to solve farmers’ problems.
Hello Tractor is working to improve the productivity of small farms through its digital tractor sharing application. Tractor access in Africa is a major barrier to agricultural growth. There are 200 tractors per 100,000 square kilometres globally whereas in Africa there are just 13 tractors per 100,000 square kilometres. Hello, Tractor is using IoT technology or the extension of the internet into physical objects, and artificial intelligence to address this problem.
Hello Tractor’s platform connects farmers in need of tractors and tractor owners. Farmers make accounts, pay an initial fee, and request a tractor for a specific date. Through Hello Tractor, tractor owners offer their tractors for rental and install technology that monitors its use. This service significantly decreases the cost of farming and provides additional income to tractor owners. Using one of Hello Tractor’s tractors can be 40 times more efficient and one-third of the cost of manual labor.
