What this life looks like
You use technology to transform African agriculture. AgriTech innovators build digital tools that help farmers grow more, lose less, access markets, get paid fairly, and adapt to climate change — from satellite crop monitoring and mobile advisory apps to digital marketplace platforms and precision irrigation systems. In a continent where agriculture employs 60% of the workforce but faces massive productivity gaps, AgriTech has extraordinary potential for both impact and commercial success.
What she actually does
You identify specific problems in agricultural value chains — access to market prices, weather information, soil testing, credit, input supply, or post-harvest storage — and build technology solutions that address them, conduct user research with farmers in their actual contexts, test and iterate your product in real field conditions, build partnerships with agricultural extension services, development organisations, and corporate agricultural buyers, and measure the agricultural and economic outcomes your product delivers.
Where you can work
| Sector | Places in Africa |
|---|---|
| Your Own Startup | Most AgriTech innovators build their own ventures — Hello Tractor, Apollo Agriculture, and Twiga all began this way |
| AgriTech Incubators | CcHUB Agri Accelerator (Nigeria), GSMA AgriTech programme, AFAP — AgriTech-specific support programmes |
| Development Finance | USAID Feed the Future, Gates Foundation Agricultural Development, CGIAR — funders supporting AgriTech scale-up |
| Agribusiness Companies | Large agribusiness and agricultural input companies building digital platforms for their farmer networks |
Why it matters in Africa
Africa spends over $35 billion annually importing food that could be grown on the continent. Smallholder farmers — most of them women — produce 80% of Africa's food using methods with minimal technology support. Digital tools that connect farmers to market prices, advisory information, credit, and input supply have demonstrated significant productivity and income impact in multiple African studies. Companies like Hello Tractor (mechanisation marketplace), Twiga Foods (produce supply chain), Pula (crop insurance), and Apollo Agriculture (credit) are building the infrastructure of a technology-enabled African agriculture.
Your pathway in
- Spend significant time with farming communities before building anything — AgriTech built without deep understanding of smallholder farmer realities consistently fails
- Develop technical skills alongside agricultural knowledge: the best AgriTech founders understand both their technology and the farming systems they are designing for
- Study what has worked: the GSMA AgriTech programme, CGIAR, and USAID Feed the Future all publish research on which AgriTech interventions actually improve farmer outcomes
- Connect with AGRA (Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa), the African Agricultural Technology Foundation, and country-level agricultural innovation hubs
- Secure agri-focused impact funding: Acumen, Grofin, and development finance institutions all fund proven African AgriTech solutions
Skills you will need
- Deep farmer and farming system knowledge
- Product development and user research in low-resource contexts
- Agricultural value chain analysis
- Impact measurement for agricultural outcomes
- Fundraising from agri-focused impact investors
- Partnership building with extension services and development agencies
A woman in this field
Aisha Raheem-Bolarinwa
Kenya
Aisha Raheem-Bolarinwa is a prominent Nigerian entrepreneur, agritech innovator, and strategy consultant widely recognized for leveraging data and technology to transform African agriculture. She is the co-founder and CEO of Farmz2U, a digital agritech platform launched in 2019 that helps smallholder farmers automate production, plant crops, and minimize post-harvest food waste.
Take your first step
- Research Hello Tractor at hellotractor.com and Apollo Agriculture at apolloagriculture.com — both document their approaches to serving African farmers with technology and their teams have shared their founding stories and lessons widely
- Spend time in farming communities: volunteer with an agricultural NGO or development programme that works with smallholder farmers. Understanding the realities of farming life — its seasonal rhythms, its financial pressures, its information gaps — is the essential foundation for any AgriTech innovator
- Study CGIAR's published research at cgiar.org — they are the world's largest agricultural research network and their publications document what technology interventions actually improve farmer productivity and income in African contexts
- Research the GSMA AgriTech report at gsma.com — they track the global AgriTech market and publish specific insights on what is working in African mobile-based agricultural services