CTA has awarded four grants to support the use of blockchain in agriculture across Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP).
With CTA’s support Bioversity International, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), Erba 96 and Nitidae will implement blockchain projects in Côte d’Ivoire; Papua New Guinea; Sierra Leone; Trinidad and Tobago; and Uganda.
With blockchain every transaction …
Access to adequate financing is often identified as one of the key inhibitors to achieving long-term sustainability for Africa’s agricultural practitioners, particularly small-holder and subsistence-level farmers who typically must resort to borrowing from community members or pooling resources in order to make ends meet.
While 55 percent of Africa’s population is …
“Opportunities in agriculture are beyond the imagination,” said Buffy Okeke-Ojiudu, the proud owner of a 200-hectare (495-acre) palm oil plantation in the southeast.
“The future billionaires in Nigeria will be people investing in agriculture, tech and renewable energy, which are sectors that can create employment, not like the oil sector,” said …
Twelve million young people enter the African workforce each year with only roughly 3 million jobs available to them. To many, an agricultural career is not a glamorous prospect, particularly as climate change degrades land and disrupts weather patterns, making it harder for farmers to grow enough to feed even …
In Kenya, smallholder farmers lack access to financial services and face high barriers to accessing commercial banks and community lending institutions. These institutions rarely approve loans to smallholder farmers or have a slow turnaround time for approval, preventing farmers from getting capital when they need it in the agricultural cycle. …
Small-scale farmers, account for a large portion of food produced in many parts of Africa. Investment should target them to increase the welfare of citizens, improve food security and drive the economic development.
One setback the smallholder farmer has suffered from time immemorial is financing.
The African Union, through a number of …
African countries should look within to the private sector to fund their own infrastructure rather than borrowing from international markets to plug financing gaps, said Akinwumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank. Read …
The digital cloud is high above every smallholder farm in Africa. We have the opportunity to bring the power of the cloud down to earth, and transform the ability of smallholder farmers to access finance, information and markets as never before. On Monday, a landmark edition of the international journal …
The potential growth of Africa’s food and beverage markets will only be possible with adequate investment in small and medium-sized agribusiness enterprises. Small African firms engaged in agribusiness greatly outnumber the large players. Policymakers need to support agribusiness and technology incubators, export-processing zones and production networks. They must also sharpen …
Watch BBC’s Hannah McNeish’s report on a Kenyan company offering loans to farmers where the interest rates charged are linked to the quality of the soil, providing an incentive for soil preservation. See …
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