Rural mobile connectivity is still poor in Africa, according to the GSMA Mobile Economy Africa 2016 Report. Mobile connectivity can help smallholders get access to relevant market information and financial services, which are essential for their development. Affordability is another key issue, as the report states that in countries such as Chad and Niger, for example, "mobile broadband represents around 200% of the annual income of the bottom 20% of the population." Nevertheless, mobile financial services are hugely important in sub-saharan Africa, with the region representing 63% of active...
Family farmers need information and technology tools that can help them thrive and feed a growing population, with challenges like climate change and natural resource scarcity making agriculture more knowledge-intensive, according to FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva. "Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can have a profound impact on the efficiency, resilience, and inclusion of poor family farmers," Graziano da Silva said. This is why FAO is pushing ahead with a digital strategy that aims to support the world's most vulnerable through knowledge sharing and bottom-up...
10,000 years of agricultural evolution can be largely grouped into just four development eras: Paleothic (early domestication of plants and animals), Antiquity (roughly the 2000 years BCE, in which more efficient farming systems were developed), the Modern Era (roughly 1700 to 1900 when mechanization and fertilizers emerged) and the Green Revolution (1930s-60s, when transformative crop genetics and fertilization practices developed). As with so many things, the pace of change- even in agriculture- is increasing rapidly, and it turns out that even agriculture is not immune to the changes of...
