Agriculture is an inevitable aspect of human life because it is the primary source of food and some natural resources. In this natural world, its relevance will remain because human lives depend on agriculture for survival. The African continent is no exception as more than 60 percent of people in sub-Saharan Africa are smallholder farmers. Women, despite their marginalization over the past years, cannot be overlooked because in Africa their contribution to the labour of food production for both household consumption and sales is between 60 to 80 percent.
The massive contribution from women to Africa’s agricultural production is undoubtedly very significant. However, more of these women are engaged in small-scale farming. Small scale farming means low technology, often characterized by the use of less sophisticated or traditional tools. Efforts are being made by governments, non-governmental and other agricultural agencies to advance agriculture making science and technology dominant in its production. Despite the slow pace of this advancement, some individuals including women have made great advancements in self and structural development.
This ushers us into this new area of agriculture slowly gaining traction called “Ag-tech” where various software are being developed to perform various functions in the agricultural space, a basic “ag-tech” software encompasses record-keeping, livestock management, and producer-buyer communication. As time keeps going on, more advanced software are being developed to even monitor the harvest readiness of plants and even as far as monitoring the nutrient levels needed by the plants among others.
Christine Su, Dennis Donohue and Danielle Goud are just some of the very few women in America fighting tooth and nail since starting their companies just to get a foot in the door; scaling down to Africa, it must be mentioned that since 2016 the Ag-tech industry has considerably been booming with the likes of Agrimatic, Aerobotics and farmcrowdy making waves across Africa. What all these Ag-tech companies have in common is that they are all owned and operated by men with very few women performing top executive roles or even featured as co-owners. This points out clearly how the ratio of women to men in this industry is relatively lower.
Notable among reasons why few women venture into the field is financial support, it is really hard for women to get investors to invest in their startups for various reasons as well as the reason of societal expectation limiting women from achieving more especially in the technology sector. This has orchestrated the huge gap in the industry as we know it today, cementing the claim that the contributions of women are highly downplayed or not even regarded.
All in all, Ag-tech is a booming sector in the technology space but even the very few women who have ventured into the sector are still fighting because, in terms of returns, the other companies within the sector run by men rake in way more for the same work their women counterparts do. African women are also not getting the financial support to venture into this field and the very few who have been able to do it face a series of issues professionally and socially. The fact still remains that women play a substantial role in Africa’s agricultural economy yet their contributions are often overlooked. Ag-tech is an innovative branch in the agricultural sector that would really flourish with a couple more women helping pull the strings.
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