How We're Helping African Farmers Grow

Justin Norman: Farming is the number one source of employment in Africa, yet its agricultural productivity is the lowest of any region in the world. This is harming rural communities which have a lack of economic opportunity, and climate change is making things even worse. So young Africans are building innovative solutions to tackle the problems that are impacting their families and communities. Using technology to turn the Sahara green.

Wissal Ben Moussa: The oasis for me, masterpieces of survival. 

Justin Norman: Domestically manufacturing organic fertilizers.

Samuel Rigu: We are aiming to increase farm productivity.

Justin Norman: And building critical infrastructure to ensure harvests make it to the market.

Francis Nderitu: We have been able to reduce post-harvest losses from an average of 40 percent to less than 1 percent.

Justin Norman: Africa is home to 60% of the world's uncultivated farmland, its farming potential is immense, with the right investments in technology, infrastructure and sustainable practices, could Africa feed the world?

Justin Norman: Here is an oasis, a rare patch of life in the harsh desert. These can form on water rises to the surface from underground springs or rivers, creating pockets of fertility in otherwise barren landscapes. But they can also be shaped by human hands, by using ingenuity to turn dry soil into thriving ecosystems. It's an ancient practice, but one that's increasingly under threat. 

Wissal Ben Moussa: In the Guelmim region, I remember not a long time ago that it was once a vibrant agricultural region or hub. Today, we found ourselves with lots of issues.  

Justin Norman: Climate change, poor land management and overexploitation pushed deserts to spread, shrink oases and transform fertile land into wastelands.

Wissal Ben Moussa: Those pressures have really changed and reshaped not only the land but also the communities depend on it. It’s a staggering reality. We lose about 13 million hectares of productive arable land every year. It’s an area the size of the country of Greece. 

Justin Norman: Meet Wissal Ben Moussa, Co-founder and R&D officer at Sand To Green, a startup transforming deserts into sustainable farmland.

Wissal Ben Moussa: We’re here at Domaine Nzaha, it’s a 20 hectare open sky laboratory. If you look around, it’s one of the only green areas in the region throughout the year. And for us it’s always a powerful example to show that with the right practices it’s possible. 

Justin Norman: By combining traditional farming techniques with cutting edge technology, Sand To Green transforms how agriculture is done. Using plant databases, satellite imagery, and IoT sensors they monitor soil, water, and crop health in real time.

Wissal Ben Moussa: Our focus is on restoring soil health, creating biodiversity by using practices like agroforestry, planting around the trees, crop rotation, cover cropping, holistic grazing. 

Justin Norman: These are key practices of regenerative agriculture - a farming approach that orchestrates activities in harmony with nature to ensure healthier land, more food, and a sustainable future for farming.

Wissal Ben Moussa: One of our most straightforward designs deployed is the use of an agroforestry system with the different tree, shrub and crop with the agricultural layering.

Justin Norman: By implementing this system, tall trees act as a canopy, reducing evaporation, shielding the crops below from wind, and enriching the soil with nutrients. But none of this will work without one crucial element: water.

Wissal Ben Moussa: We are in an arid area and the water is scarce. One of our flagship projects is using renewable groundwater that needs desalination. 

Justin Norman: Desalination removes salt and minerals from brackish or seawater, transforming it into fresh water suitable for agriculture and more. With solar powered desalination units, Sand to Green harnesses this process to create renewable freshwater.

Wissal Ben Moussa: It’s cliche but I have a dream of a green desert, or at least green zones with stable ecosystems where new techniques complete the ancestral knowhow and try to build a blueprint for restoring arid lands.

Justin Norman: However, creating arable land is just one part of the challenge. Farming productivity in Africa remains low, partly due to limited access to affordable fertilizer. Centralized production means fertilizers are expensive to transport to rural areas, burdening small scale farmers with high costs and low yields. Safi Organics is a company working to break the cycle.

Samuel Rigu: From data it has been shown that in Africa we are paying 2 to 5 times the world fertilizer prices. 

Justin Norman: Meet Samuel Rigu, Co-founder and CEO of Safi Organics, on a mission to boost farming productivity in his home country of Kenya and across Africa.

Samuel Rigu: The governments in Africa are doing subsidy programs but the subsidy is still never enough. Our purchasing power is relatively low, hence they can only afford the cheapest of these fertilizers. These cheap fertilizers make the soil acidified, and once the pH has has gone low, the productivity goes low. So at the end of the day Safi Organics we are looking at manufacturing locally to cut down the logistical cost, ensuring that the farmers are able to get the fertilizer at a more affordable price. In terms of the impact to the farmers we are working with, we have seen an increase in yield of up to 30 percent. 

Justin Norman: This is what Safi Organics calls the decentralized model, where production factories are set up right in the heart of farming communities to create a complete loop of the value chain.

Samuel Rigu: We start from when the farmer had produced the farm waste. We have youth groups who we empower to supply us with the raw materials. We take them through a training process on the conversion of the farm waste into biochar. 

Justin Norman: Biochar is produced by heating organic waste in a low oxygen environment, preventing full combustion and creating a porous, stable form of carbon. It serves as a soil amendment while also returning carbon to the ground, reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Samuel Rigu: Once we have it here we do the mixing with the special nutrient mixes to form the different products to fit the local soils. For example, here in Kirinyaga the soils are highly acidified. In a place like Kisumu the soil there are alkaline. Now, if you look at the synthetic fertilizers, they are a one-fit-all kind of product. But for us, we are able to produce a slightly alkaline or a slightly acidified fertilizer. 

Justin Norman: This decentralized approach works well for a small region, but to keep costs low across different areas, it must be scaled and replicated.

Samuel Rigu: One of the things that we are doing right now is showing Kenya as an example that this is a replicable model. We can replicate this model starting from East Africa and then across Africa. 

Justin Norman: Creating the right on-farm conditions to grow crops is an important part of the journey. Ensuring they reach markets efficiently is another challenge. Even with higher farm productivity, post-harvest loss remains a significant issue. It is estimated that as much as 37% of food produced in sub-Saharan Africa was lost between production and consumption, often due to inadequate storage and transportation infrastructure. According to data from AgBase, an initiative powered by Briter Bridges and Mercy Corps Agrifin, off-farm funding for businesses that tackle issues like post-harvest loss only accounts for one-third of total agriculture funding in Africa, and that share is reducing year over year. Keep IT Cool is a company in Kenya looking to combat this issue by improving the cold chain and transportation networks to ensure that harvests reach consumers without spoiling.Meet Francis Nderitu, Founder of Keep IT Cool.

Francis Nderitu: We provide proximite cooling services to fish farmers, as well as poultry farmers, to help them reduce post-harvest losses and be more climate resilient. For example, Lake Turkana, in Kenya, post-harvest losses are very high, up to 40 percent. Because of very high ambient temperatures, up to 40 degrees, coupled with poor handling techniques, and this is where Keep IT Cool comes in. We train the fisherfolk on how to handle the fish better. We have our solar powered ice flake machine that is producing ice and servicing these fishing communities so that they can keep the fish at the right temperature. The way we work as Keep IT Cool, we start from the demand side, where we are able to have predictive data using technology. We aggregate all of the demand and we go to the fisherfolk communities and say this is what we will be offtaking every week or every month, so that once they go fishing they know that there is already a market for their produce. We have to create a lot of demand depending now on the customer needs. For example, we do gutting and scaling for the people who want whole round fish, we do chunking and filetting, and its packaged according to the order of the customer. By doing that, we have unlocked premium prices for smallholder fisherfolk and that’s how we have been able to increase their income. Before Keep IT Cool, the post-harvest losses on average were about 37 percent for all fisherfolk. And those people who are now using Keep IT Cool’s platform, they’re now making less than 1 percent post-harvest losses.

Justin Norman: Keeping produce fresh from source to market is one problem. But sustaining a productive supply, especially amid climate change, is another.

Francis Nderitu: The way fishing is affected by climate change is the change of temperatures affect migration patterns. And with this erratic change of weather, the fish you predicted part of the area of the lake for them to be, they’re not there. This erratic weather patterns basically means their income is also destabalized, and that translates to another way that we need to make them more resilient by providing a secondary way to make income. And that’s why we are transitioning some of them into fish farming, into poultry farming, using the same existing infrastructure of Keep IT Cool that we have around those communities. 

Justin Norman: Africa's agriculture sector holds immense opportunity. To fully realize this potential, significant investment in technology and infrastructure is needed, blending traditional practices with cutting-edge innovation. And it's the entrepreneurs driven by a desire to solve challenges for their families and communities, who are pushing progress forward.

Samuel Rigu: I was born in a rural village and one afternoon with my grandmother in the field, she said words I’ll never forget. Son, 20 years back, we were harvesting double of what we harvest today and I’m afraid in the future there will be no food in this land to feed your children. So you need to go school, study hard and get off the farm. But as I grew, I realized I’m not the only one who depends on the agriculture, or my children, but many other children.  

Wissal Ben Moussa: We are hit in the face by climate change, it’s touching so many people around me. I hear stories from neighbors, I hear stories around villages. I go to picnic spaces that I used to run into and even swim sometimes and I don’t find them anymore. And that is happening in the span of 10, 15 years. It’s not about searching for a better place, it’s about just trying to better up the place where you are. And I don’t think we should be losing hope in a space where have people leaving. So I just thought that I have the obligation to give back.

Justin Norman: Thanks for watching this episode of The Greenprint, The Flip’s series on climate action and economic development across Africa. For more episodes like this, please hit that subscribe button. This episode was produced in partnership with Catalyst Fund, Delta40, Africa Climate Ventures and Agbase, an initiative powered by Briter and Mercy Corps Agrifin. If you want to learn more, we've added some resources and links in our description as well.