In Mozambique, an agriculture expert from an aid agency is reported to having said that it took him years to understand that boosting yields on farms is only half the battle, and that unless one goes a step further to connect farmers to market opportunities, development assistance is often a dead end. Farmers on the other hand understand this in only one season. Without a market they do not only lose income, they risk all their capital. It becomes difficult for such farmers to invest in good seeds and fertilizers again – it makes no sense.
There are ongoing debates about the best way to use agricultural lands in Mozambique.
Dr. Joseph Hanlon, a veteran expert on the social studies of Mozambique and Teresa Smart have stated in a paper, “there are no “subsistence farmers”. No one grows all their own food, and most are involved in the market, at least in a small way, and most families have members doing wage labour, at least ganho ganho (day labour). They are also very poor. The median cash income in rural Mozambique is only 700 MT per year – less than $2 per month – and most families farm less than 1 ha with only a hoe. And rural poverty is increasing”.
There is clear need to increase the productivity and earnings of family and smallholder farmers, who constitute approximately 70 per cent of the labor force. Recent GDP growth has largely been driven by natural resource ‘mega-projects’ that make limited use of the domestic marketplace, leave the structure of the traditional agricultural economy largely untouched and therefore have not had an impact on poverty reduction. Of the 3.8 million farms in Mozambique, accounting for 95% of the country’s agricultural production, only 26,000 are medium sized and a mere 840 are classified as large; the rest are family and smallholder farms.
Agriculture is practiced on less than 10% of the arable land and largely in flood- and drought-prone areas. Difficult access to credit and markets, low use of improved inputs and the dominance of rain-fed agriculture make the sector vulnerable to shocks of all kinds.
A key to providing access to markets, inputs, and new and intelligent technologies for family and smallholder farmers is access to small scale networks. Ways for those within range of the farm to know what products are available when and where and access to an agricultural m-commerce platform, next generation farming apps, especially in an African country like Mozambique, that is not mobile first, but mobile only. There is a need to start generating the smart data for the digitization and put in place, in the local context, the next generation infrastructure necessary to make things happen.
I posit that, the latest advances and technological breakthroughs that allow machines to “learn” rather than be programmed to accomplish a task, to see, understand and smell and promising new-generation materials and structural shapes, pose an opportunity for “African exponential entrepreneurs” to build home-grown cobots (collaborative robots), cyber physical systems for agriculture, expert system for crop pest and disease management, agricultural m-commerce platform, farming apps and fixing the much needed rural infrastructure for the digitization revolution.
My moonshot idea: a new rural development narrative and blue print for developing countries in Africa grounded on the technological empowerment of our people and mostly the youth, in rural areas – to tame AI and cyber-physical systems – and leverage on it – to improve their lives, their community, ramp up inclusive growth and in turn reduce unemployment, inequality and poverty.
What would happen, if “cobot dome house networks”, a new special kind of next-generation exponential infrastructures for accelerating digitization of agriculture and rural economy in Africa, powered by “exponential technologies” like IoT, Distributed Ledger technologies/Blockchain, Advanced Robotics, Machine Learning and 3D printing, were available in rural areas from where family or smallholder farmers could get the technology (cyber-physical systems, embedded expert systems – multiple local African language support (NLP) – voice assisted texting) , improved seeds and fertilizer, pest control, new farming techniques like hydroponics and aeroponics which can produce more food in less space and yields faster, credit, etc, video based extension, disseminated through local platforms in local languages by local people. Local content is key for local development.
We are going to need to adapt to the industrial level of innovation – today AI is a reality and will change family and smallholder farming as we know it.
This new kind of enabling exponential infrastructures, which I hereby coin “cobot dome house networks”, will help spur collaboration, partnership and growth of family and smallholder farmers, traders, SMEs and other stakeholders at the local, regional, national and international level spearheaded by top exponential innovators and entrepreneurs delivering exponential technologies that will create transformational growth opportunities for the rural economy.
“Cobot dome house networks” is the next big thing that will help Mozambique creatively “beat the odds” and find a way to solve a broad array of problems family and smallholder farmers face from inputs, production, post-harvest processing, storing, ICT-enabled marketing and access to markets. These are like local distribution centers, instead of massive central warehouses, many village-centric ones – with cobots inside, and other equipment offering utility-type infrastructure services -Post Harvest Handling: Processing, Storage, Distribution & electronic warehouse receipt systems, transaction processing and improved technologies for family and smallholder farmers – servitization or pay-per-use models – equipment providing advanced services to deliver pay per use, availability, outcome.
In Mozambique, for an effective enabling “Cobot dome house network” exponential infrastructure, less than 500 “Cobot dome houses”, covering all 161 districts, 437 administrative posts, need to be 3D printed using a new generation of materials for structural applications. The 3D printing process would take less than a day for each dome house and these would be equipped (with select exponential technologies relevant for each local context) in just a few days.
With “Cobot dome house networks” in each of the districts of Mozambique, lack of credit for investments in new digital technology for changing family and smallholder farming, postharvest technology, unreliable electric power supply, lack of transport options, storage facilities and/or packaging materials, as well as a host of other constraints will be a thing of the past – the magic will happen inside the dome house itself (exponential innovations inside).
The Mozambican market lacks linkages between agricultural suppliers and purchasers. From a buyer perspective, engaging numerous individual and dispersed family and smallholder farmers introduces too many transaction costs to make sourcing viable. Family and smallholder Farmers, on the other hand, lack ancillary services like processing or storage and lack access to the large-scale purchasers, limiting demand for their supply. Introducing an intermediary actor, through “Cobot dome house networks” infrastructure approach in the value chain between the supplier and purchaser will enable aggregation of supply —thereby reducing the transaction costs of individual family and smallholder farmer engagement—and this will provide other ancillary services to solve the pain points at the local contexts.
These domes houses will have embedded in them complete cold storage systems for modern agricultural warehouses and food processing and packaging needs – enabled by platform technologies – giving the flexibility to meet the challenges of a dynamic changing market – for value-added processing and marketing, with cost minimization in production, and storage facilities for warehouse receipt systems (WRS).
Under a warehouse receipt system, a warehouse receipt (WR) is issued to a named depositor (who may be a family or smallholder farmer, farmer group, processor or trader) as evidence that he or she has deposited a specified commodity, of stated quantity and quality, at a specified location. The holder of the receipt may pledge it to a lender (with the stored commodity being the collateral for a loan) or transfer it to a buyer (by way of a sale). The warehouse operator or collateral manager, who has custody of the stocks, guarantees delivery against the receipt, and should be able to make good any value lost through theft, fire or other catastrophes. The key players in the WRS are depositors, the warehouse operator or collateral manager, and lenders.
These platforms and ecosystems that will amplify exponential innovation in the rural context will help reduce sourcing costs through efficient collection points and transportation services in markets with typically high delivery costs. They will also make high-quality agricultural supply readily available for buyers via reliable and value-adding intermediary actors. This in turn, will increase family farmer or smallholder loyalty by bundling and providing other relevant services (like extension services, finance, and product access).
Direct-food retailing for family and smallholder farmers, small businesses, and environmentally conscious consumers will be important to maximize the gains. Building apps is currently an insurmountable hurdle in the African rural context, where our people will need to be technological empowered for the changes – these include illiterate, semi-literate users and youth that will be embracing technology for the first time in the developing world.
Equalizing app developments will be needed for the new producers, new consumers that will come online, for them to be not only consumers but also producers of online content that is contextually, culturally, and locally relevant – for the mainstream adoption of the digital transformation in the rural economies, rural commerce sector and connection to urban markets.
An interesting technology from Microsoft might be able to help with bringing illiterate and semi-literate farmers, African youth into such a network, Ink to Code.
Without Ink to Code, developers and designers can brainstorm wire frames in a variety of mediums but then need to recreate their ideas by coding from scratch in Visual Studio. With Ink to Code, the magic of artificial intelligence and automation jumpstarts this process.
I believe this can improve and make automatically plumbing in workflows, integration possible, easing the pain and help equalizing app developments in the world – new producers, new consumers that will come online will benefit.
With technological empowerment of our people, a top priority of our economic advancement as the 21st century approaches, building farming systems that are ecologically sound and socially responsible in order to sustain family or smallholder farm profitability and a desirable quality of farm life, creating a new permanent, sustainable agriculture – family and smallholder “farming as a business” – will be possible. This will help family or smallholder farmers shift from farming for subsistence, to farming for profit and improved livelihoods.
There are many other parts that need to come together to help small farmers find their markets.
==> Getting “ubiquitous networks for transaction processing – country-wide is much easier — with, for example, wireless networks and leverage the recent advances and breakthroughs in networking;
==> Getting the Transaction processing Gateways (hosted in dome houses) — could also be possible for proven solutions already exist to be leveraged on;
==> Getting internet of payments is also possible and faster with the new approach to new kind of exponential infrastructures
https://www.itproportal.com/features/internet-of-payments-where-payments-and-manufacturing-collide/
Massive Technological leapfrogging will be possible in Africa.
Abel Viageiro
Email: abel.viageiro@gmail.com