By Sam Dryden, Senior Fellow, Imperial College London, former Director of Agricultural Development, Global Development Program, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
 
By 2030, half of Africans will live in cities. For those of us who work in agriculture, this is a jarring statistic. We are used to thinking about Africa as a continent of subsistence farmers, but reality is very quickly rendering our mental model obsolete. That doesn’t mean there’s no longer a need for big thinking about agriculture or rural development. On the contrary, as Kanayo Nwanze, chair of the Investment Fund for Agricultural Development, argues, the relationship between rural and urban systems in Africa is not a dichotomy but a continuum. As urbanization occurs, the link between these systems becomes more, not less, important.
 
I have spent the past several years focused on a different (but related) aspect of our mental model that needs updating: the notion that African smallholders are characterized by extreme isolation. Strive Masiyiwa, a telecommunications entrepreneur who is also chairman of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, likes to say that when he started his company EcoNet in the mid 1990s, nearly three in four Africans had never heard a telephone ring; now, more than three in four have a mobile phone.
 
This connectivity revolution creates massive opportunities for African agriculture. If digital technology is applied in the right ways, then smallholders will be able to anchor a brand new food system that makes life better for every African.
 
I use the term food system because it appreciates the fact that what we commonly refer to as agriculture affects every aspect of life. Consider the history of the American food system. In the 19^th century, American railroad companies laid track based on where they could make money shipping commodity grain, primarily corn and wheat. The American public university system was first conceived to create and disseminate knowledge about agriculture, primarily corn. Food, it turns out, is about business and industry, the built environment, public education, nutrition, and, ultimately, a collective vision of society’s future.
 
In Africa, the success of the continent’s cities will depend in part on how its food system develops—on whether it can provide affordable, nutritious food to the people who live in cities, and on whether it can foster businesses and other organizations to employ them.
 
Following is a list of five principles that can and should underlie a relevant African food system that addresses the pressing challenges and opportunities facing the continent at this moment in history.
 
Valuing the smallholder farmer
 
In the United States, farmers make up just 2 percent of the population, and the average farm size is 441 acres. In Africa, farmers make up between 60 and 70 percent of the population, and the average farm size is roughly 5 acres. The hundreds of millions of African farm families are some of the poorest people in the world. So the African food system’s first job is to help the smallholders who produce the food lift themselves and their families out of poverty. The keys are increases in productivity and access to markets, so that smallholders are able to grow enough for themselves and sell surpluses for income while supplying growing cities with the food they need.
 
This doesn’t mean requiring African smallholders to adopt new ways of living and working wholesale. It means building a digital backbone in African countries as a public good that connects all smallholders to the agribusinesses, national extensions services, and international food agencies that are supposed to support them, so that the two parties can communicate with each other in ways that help them both be more effective. 
                 
Empowering women
 
The majority of the farm labor in Africa is performed by women. The majority of services available to African farmers are tailored to men. When this gap closes, overall productivity will improve because women farmers will finally have the resources to improve their yields. The empowerment of hundreds of millions of women, though, will have far-reaching and wide-ranging effects, because, as my former boss Melinda Gates has argued so persuasively, empowered women lay the foundation for development by prioritizing things like education, health, and nutrition.
 
Focusing on the quality as well as the quantity of food
 
Malnutrition takes a brutal toll on Africa, preventing the majority of Africans from achieving their full cognitive and physical potential. For years, the global agricultural development community has prioritized yields, which makes sense when you’re trying to prevent hunger. Now, however, we know that when it comes to making sure that people not only survive but thrive, the nutritional content of food matters a lot.
                 
Creating a thriving rural economy
 
In a robust food system, farms support a range of businesses. Farmers need financial services and inputs before they begin planting; after harvest, they need storage, transport, processing, and marketing. Every single step in this process should be a business opportunity for an entrepreneur. In the ideal scenario, a food system nurtures an entire rural sector that creates wealth and provides off-farm jobs.

Protecting the environment
 
The Green Revolution of the 1960s fed a billion people in Asia. It also did significant damage to the environment, depleting the soil and reducing biodiversity. Ensuring the long-term sustainability of the African agricultural environment is even more critical now that smallholders are being forced to adapt to climate change, a problem they had almost nothing to do with causing.
 
How does digital technology support these principles?
 
First, it ends smallholders’ isolation, connecting both women and men to products, services, and information they’ve never had before. Farmers can communicate with agrodealers that provide improved seed and other inputs, learn about best practices and proper nutrition over the phone, and link up to markets through farmer organizations that aggregate their produce.
 
Second, digital technology gives smallholders a voice. Because digital communication is a two-way process, it includes smallholders in the process of change. Agro dealers, buyers, and extension agents can provide information to farmers—and farmers can provide information to them in return. With the benefit of unique identifiers, smallholders will be able to contribute to a rich database that helps the agricultural community respond to each farmer’s unique needs.
 
Using “big” databases present novel challenges—in particular the right way to protect privacy and security when the individuals whose data is collected are represented by unique identifiers. Unique identifiers are not new. They have been used widely in commerce ever since companies started to digitize their customer base and use computers to track their activities. Think of your airline frequent flyer program. When combined with the personal information required to join the program (which you voluntarily submitted), your flight history provides a unique profile allowing them to customize each of millions of relationships. Very few of these customers give second thought as to who owns this data, largely because they feel they are getting something of value. But as databases start to connect up with each other and contain more and more personal information, we have to be thoughtful about the very real concerns that will arise, and we need to make sure that the people whose data is being collected and used have a seat at the negotiating table when these processes are being agreed to.
 
The third way digital technology supports a new African food system is in the realm on non-communications digital technology. Advances like computer-powered breeding and satellite soil mapping are helping us to work better, faster. We can now develop appropriate varieties, matched to soil conditions on the ground, in just a fraction of the time it used to take when we were by necessity more approximate and scattershot in our approaches.
 
This future won’t materialize by itself; we need to make the right investments and policies, including universal broadband and data systems that are powerful yet secure. Food systems usually evolve in haphazard ways. Let’s seize this chance to build a purposeful food system that helps transform Africa.