Deploy ICT to transform agriculture
The Chief Executive Officer and founder of Image Ad, Mr Kwame Bentil, has urged African governments to expose their youth to farming, using information and communication technology (ICT) as a transformative tool to make the sector attractive to that segment of the population.
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He said unlike in Europe and the Americas where the farmer population was smaller relative to the total population, farmers in Africa tended to form the bulk of the adult population, which required them to be efficient in production.
“So we want to ensure that our farmers are productive and agriculture becomes a business venture that attracts the youth because they will see it as the most viable and productive venture,” Mr Bentil told the GRAPHIC BUSINESS in an interview in Accra.
This was shortly after Image Ad had introduced mFarms, an aggregation of various agribusiness apps on a common platform to deliver various solutions, to different actors on the agricultural value chain.
The stakeholders included warehouse owners, the Ghana Grains Council, agribusiness NGOs and development partners.
Mr Bentil said ICT was an enabler which provided an opportunity for Africa to leverage it to do more in agriculture than it was presently the case. He, therefore, encouraged the youth to venture into agriculture, using technology.
Explaining how ICT was helping to transform agric, Mr Bentil said his company and others had started using drones to improve farming and agricultural productivity. “We use drones to estimate crop yield, to know the crop health, fertiliser application and plant nutrient needs and collecting many other data which represents a huge opportunity for the youth.”
The CEO of Image Ad therefore wants the government to concentrate a little more on agriculture, as it could deliver far better results than oil was currently achieving. “Oil is not renewable, but agriculture is renewable. When you cultivate today and harvest, you can harvest the next day.”
mFarms
Providing consultancy services for multinationals involved in the agricultural sector, Image Ads developed the capacity to develop apps to support the agricultural value chain, It later received a grant from the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) to scale its services for mFarms to be extended to farmers across Africa, beyond its operational areas in Ghana. Currently, mFarms is being used in about 19 African countries.
Assisting farmers for free
The company currently has about 100,000 farmers in Ghana and about 250,000 across Africa, that use the mFarm platform for free market and crop cultivation information.
The company is able to make its services free to farmers by relying on fees it receives from its consultancy services for multinationals, development partners and international NGOs providing agricultural service support.
“Majority of our clients are multinationals which want to have access to data, which we provide for a fee. We use part of the revenue that we generate to support farmers that we work with. We believe that once we help the farmers to grow, they will add value to us,” the chief executive officer and founder of Image Ad said.
The mFarms platform is an innovative user-friendly mobile and web based system for managing and communicating with players within the agricultural value chain to help improve operational efficiency, communication and viable linkages within the value chain, thereby further unlocking the potential of the sector.
The open house event saw Image Ad taking the actors through the 16 apps, designed to optimise and enhance the operational efficiency of actor and agents with solutions such as extension and production; warehouse management; monitoring and evaluation; m-Xtension as well as farmer-to-market solutions.
Conducive environment
In spite of private sector interventions such as mFarms, Mr Bentil believes the government’s contributions could cover a number of areas, including crafting business friendly policies for actors in the agricultural value chain, which could come in the form of removing taxes on agric-related ICT solutions just as agricultural productivity itself was not taxed.
“For instance, we are into ICT but geared towards agric. But I don’t have the same kind of tax reliefs extended to people in crop cultivation because they see it as an IT company and so we end up paying a lot of taxes,” he lamented.
