Kenyan innovators turn to smart farming as food crisis worsens

Catherine Kamanu, a young farmer from central Kenya, fears the country will be faced with a looming famine due to failed rains and the supplies shortage caused by the war in Ukraine but she has been preparing for such emergencies over the past few years. Kamanu has an online community of about 28,000 followers, who are mainly smallholder farmers struggling to sustain and improve yields. She trains them on simple technologies that can help them get there. For instance, she said, the war in Ukraine has caused a global shortage of fertilizers, including in Kenya. The few supplies available on the market are not affordable to most smallholder farmers. “But I am telling farmers they can use compost manure instead. I take visuals of myself preparing compost manure which I later apply in my farm. I then post these visuals on my social media platforms and farmers can pick the demonstrations from there,” Kamanu said. As climate change and the war in Ukraine escalates the global food crisis, innovators like Kamanu are looking for smart solutions that can help troubled communities build resilience against these shocks. According to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, the country’s inflation rate stood at 6.47% in April this year, while the price of maize and wheat had almost doubled due to persistent drought and supply chain disruptions. Kamanu said the tips she shares with farmers are helping them navigate the food crisis shocks at the production level. But the Kenya Association of Manufacturers and nonprofit groups said more is needed in terms of policy review by governments to protect the public from these shocks. One way this can be done is through adoption of technologies that serve real-time data on agriculture and food systems, according to Gro Intelligence, an artificial intelligence platform that provides insights on agriculture, climate, and the economy. With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, it has developed a Food Security Tracker — a free-to-use technology that is available in 49 African countries and has real-time data on agriculture. “We have identified the fact that a lot of data that is currently available for Africa on agriculture either comes out very late or is not easily accessible to people who do not know how to find it. This is the reason we are making it freely accessible through this tool,” Philip Tuinenburg, chief of staff at Gro Intelligence, said. A virtual demonstration by Tuinenburg confirmed that the tool can serve users with data on yield forecasts, drought severity, vegetation cover as well as prices of food and agriculture supplies. The Food Security Tracker can be accessed by the public including smallholder farmers, but Tuinenburg said it is also meant to serve governments, humanitarian organizations, and the private sector to address the growing global food crisis. “We want to focus information on what is happening with supply and demand so that decision-makers and humanitarian organizations can identify where there is going to be a squeeze and so they can pre-deploy or deploy resources differently than they have been doing,” he said. Thule Lenneiye, the coordinator at the agriculture transformation office of Kenya’s Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries and Cooperatives, said food systems innovations can help smallholder farmers digitize farming practices that are failing to make an impact. Responding to the increasing demand for these innovations, her ministry in partnership with Microsoft has developed the AgriBot, a chatbot technology providing over 400,000 smallholder farmers in Kenya with extension and advisory services through short message services, WhatsApp, and Telegram. Another innovation, the Mastercard Farm Pass has been serving about a million smallholder farmers in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and India with market and supply chain information. With this innovation, smallholder farmers can, for instance, get information about the trending market prices for their produce, as well as where and how to source for quality farm inputs like fertilizers and make a transaction. But farmers that have used innovations serving food systems like the Food Security Tracker, AgriBot, and the Mastercard Farm Pass said the platforms, which are designed to solve specific problems, can sometimes be limited to select communities. While some are funded by development groups with interests in the innovations, they mostly address the issues facing farmers from a top-down approach — excluding the farmers from the decision-making process, according to Emrys Schoemaker, a researcher and strategist at Caribou Digital. A smart solution to this problem would be the adoption of social agriculture, a system that simplifies digital technologies so as to address problems facing farmers through a bottom-up approach, he said. Social agriculture utilizes the power and reach of social media platforms like Facebook to exchange farming information and tips among online communities including supply chains and markets for their produce. Schoemaker describes social agriculture as an innovation whereby laypersons can use available digital technologies to solve the problems they are facing, regardless of whether there is funding from development groups or not. For instance, early results of a study that Caribou Digital is conducting indicate that over 60% of Kenyans said Facebook is the most important and most popular platform for the farming community in the country. Schoemaker said its popularity in the country is even attracting Kenyans working in cities and those looking for jobs in offices to venture into agriculture as an easy and alternative way of generating income. “As a response to the food crisis, people facing economic insecurity are turning to social media as an easy entry point into agriculture and an easy way of making money,” he said. Gladys Wanja, another farmer from central Kenya, said the use of social media to profile her farming activities has won her a community of over 100,000 followers. Apart from marketing her produce through the platform, she uses it to educate farmers on how to adopt technologies like drip irrigation, which help them build resilience against the pressures of climate change. But social media as a tool to navigate the rising food crisis has challenges, she said. For instance, some of the platforms like WhatsApp have a limited number of people that can interact through it. In addition, only 30% of Kenyans use the internet, and Wanja said most farmers are reluctant to adopt new technologies for fear that they may not be affordable or that they may harm them. “It is an uphill task convincing them that these are technologies or innovations that will help us to fight the food crisis,” she said.