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Rabat – Over the past five years OCP Africa’s Udongo has been supporting small-scale farmers in Africa who face increasingly hard conditions due to climate change and economic hardship. The initiative, which was launched in 2019, now extends to seven countries, where over 233,200 local farmers now participate in the tech-driven effort to provide digital solutions to age-old problems.
Udongo is a digital platform that aims to boost the productivity of smallholder farmers by addressing some of the core challenges they face every day. These challenges include a lack of access to quality agricultural inputs such as fertilizer and seeds, a lack of reliable economic information and insights into local and global markets.
Udongo’s digital platform, which includes a website and a mobile app, provides local farmers with the vital information usually reserved only for giant agricultural companies. This information allows farmers to make strategic decisions, make the best use of their land, plant profitable crops, and boost their productivity and sustainability.
The Udongo platform does this by providing a digital marketplace that provides local farmers with access to high-quality inputs such as seeds and fertilizers tailored to the local soil, while connecting farmers directly with service providers to help mechanize their operations, or provide veterinary and agronomic support.
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The power of the platform comes from its ability to distribute high-level agricultural knowledge of local soil health and crop needs, ensuring no valuable inputs go to waste and the largest possible yield can be produced for the lowest cost to the farmer. It additionally provides weather forecasting to provide accurate weather information to help plan agricultural activities.
Beyond the up-to-date provision of vital information and farm management tools, it also aims to boost the capacity of farmers themselves by providing education and training through its digital farming academy. This educational content helps exchange best practices to boost the skills and knowledge of participating farmers.
One particularly promising aspect of Udongo’s platform, which has been rapidly adopted by hundreds of thousands of farmers in seven countries, is that it’s scalable. Because the platform is a digital tool, it can easily be scaled to other countries and regions, potentially reaching millions of farmers in the future. And the more people use the platform, the more data and best practices there are to be shared among participants.
For farmers from Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal or Tanzania who are eager to participate in the platform, they can register for free at the Udongo website online.
Once they are registered,the Udongo mobile app, downloadable at the Google Play store, will provide them with all the key insights they require to boost their skills, strengthen their sustainability and enhance the yields they depend on.
