Grow Digital; Leveraging Digital Transformation to Drive Sustainable Food Systems in Africa was the theme for the 2019 African Green Revolution Forum in Accra Ghana. Thus, Africa as a continent is taking advantage of the already existing and new emerging technologies to boost and expand the agricultural sectors of various countries on the continent. Having the opportunity to partake in the forum by the honorarium received from Youthlead, I can testify that almost every present agreed to the fact that digitizing our agricultural sector as a continent will do us a lot of good.
This is what the president of the Republic of Ghana had to say in view of that, ‘the obvious instrument for modernizing our countries and societies is digital technology’. His excellency made that comment in the High-level panel discussions during the presidential summit of the 2019 African Green Revolution Forum. To battress his point he said mobile penetration has been rapid on the African continent especially in his country Ghana, and so more can be done in our society than before and he believes that a few years to come much more will be achieved.
I realized, though the President of Ghana gave much hope to his people and painted a very progressive picture in terms of digitization of the agricultural sector, a few still did not behold that picture. This is due to some rising challenges they have seen and projected.
Three of these challenges are issues of accessibility of information, adaptability and low youth participation in decision making. It was boldly stated by a panel member that, data and information are near useless if farmers cannot access and put to use. Pondering over this statement made me realized how local or farmer in the remote areas in Africa cannot access and make use of data and information in the current state of development, so then what will be the end results if the agriculture sector should be digitalized? It must be noted that data and information should be made easily accessible to these farmers who must also be equipped with the technical know-how to use these pieces of information.
Secondly, adaptability was indicated as a challenge in terms of digitizing the agriculture sector of Africa. This is in the sense that most of the current technology are developed without local farmers in mind. So if results in these farmers striving to adopt to the technology, but a panel member during the discussion believed that it should rather be that these current technologies will be developed to adapt to the local farmers. The reason was that these farmers were born outside the ‘computer age’ so they find it difficult to adapt to most of the current technologies. So the local farmers should be consulted in the making of the technologies so that it can be developed to fit what they are really looking for and not what developers think farmers need.
Finally, the statement made by the president of the Republic of Ghana H.E Nana Akuffo Addo and I quote ‘ the digitization of the African agriculture presents a fertile ground for the youth involvement in the sector’, seemed more like an abstract one. I say this because present at the forum I noticed that youth present was not something to write home about. With the current youth being very familiar with technology and the old no being so familiar, how is it not a problem and a challenge if there is a forum to digitalize the agricultural sector of Ghana and youth are not really getting involved?
I suggest policymakers, political leaders, and stakeholders of the African continent will involve and pull along the youth in times like this for ‘we cannot ignore our young people when Africa it self is a young continent’.