Giving Compass' Take:

• Food Tank talks with Priscilla Asonibare from the groundbreaking Nigerian company, Hello Tractor, about their work in Africa, industry trends, and the potential of the sharing economy for agriculture.

• The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) states that the average African farmer is 60 years old, yet 60 percent of Africans are younger than 24 years old. How can this technology inspire Africa's youth to pursue agriculture?

• Here's why training youth is key to growing African agriculture. 

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 percent 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 labor 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.

Read the full article on how technology is serving African agriculture for the better by Mackenzie Dion at Food Tank.