By Irene Gaitirira
Published August 11, 2018
African institutions of higher learning should adapt their curriculum to enable technology-driven farmers and to focus on agribusiness entrepreneurship for young people, rising beyond theories to application.
Akinwumi Adesina, President of the African Development Bank Group (AfDB), says this would be in line with what he refers to as the rapid pace of growth of the use of drones, automated tractors, artificial intelligence, robotics and block chains.
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Dr Adesina, a former Minister for Agriculture in Nigeria and winner of the World Food Prize in 2017, has also called upon African governments to give farmers across the continent new technologies with the potential to transform agricultural production.
Saying technologies to achieve Africa’s green revolution exist but that are mostly just sitting on the shelves, Adesina, who was addressing the 2018 Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA) Annual Meeting held in the United States of America’s political capital, Washington, D.C, on August 5, 2018, said that lack of policies was a drawback to the scaling up of these technologies.
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AfDB says it is currently working with the World Bank, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to mobilise US$1 Billion to scale up agricultural technologies across Africa under an initiative called Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT) that is targeted at bringing down some of the barriers preventing farmers from accessing latest seed varieties and technologies to improve their productivity.
Through its Enable Youth initiative, Adesina says, AfDB has in the past two years committed close to US$300 Million to develop the next generation of agribusiness and commercial farmers for Africa.
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“There is no reason why Africa should be spending US$35 Billion a year importing food. All it needs to do is to harness the available technologies with the right policies and rapidly raise agricultural productivity and incomes for farmers, and assure lower food prices for consumers,” Adesina told the more than 1 600 agricultural and applied economists from around the world gathered in Washington, D.C.
Dr Adesina said AfDBb is investing US$24 Billion over the next ten years to implement its Feed Africa Strategy with the aim of helping Africa transform its agriculture.
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