Harnessing the digital technologies to strengthen resilience of African food systems during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond

Abstract

Because of its direct and indirect impacts on food production and value chains, COVID-19 pandemic severely affected smallholder farmers, who are responsible for feeding most of the population in vulnerable communities. The lockdown and movement restrictions constrain the farmers from accessing distant and often profitable markets in many countries. In some countries, COVID-19-related interruptions affected labour availability, on-farm commodity inspection and primary production operations (land preparation, planting, harvesting etc.), delivery of farm inputs, mechanisation, essential agricultural extension services. However, farmers in developed countries took advantage of digital technologies at their disposal to adapt to the impacts of COVID-19 on agricultural production, labour availability, input supply and marketing. For instance, digital agriculture solutions that link farmers to buyers and logistics services helped to lessen the effects of restricted market access and aggregators. Most of the smallholder farmers in Africa have not benefited from this opportunity, as they lack basic digitalisation infrastructure and capacities. Therefore, increasing investment in technologies to help smallholder farmers could yield far-reaching benefits and prevent major disruptions on the food value chain during pandemics. Hence, public policy should put more emphasis on boosting digitalisation complementary infrastructure and human capacity, address gender access to technology disparities, and minimise risks associated with digitalisation.