Real-life Farmville and a pregnancy app for cows – mobile technology is changing the way farmers do business in Africa.
The Farmable app which acts as a real-life Farmville, allowing investors to buy, monitor and trade virtual stock linked to real animals in local Ghanaian farms.
Another valuable app is iCow. Billed as “the world’s first mobile phone cow calendar”, iCow is designed to help dairy farmers track the gestation period and progress of their cows.
In Kenya, presenter Ndoni Khanyile meets Richard Turere. The 13-year-old Maasai boy devised a solution to guard farmers’ livestock from lions. This is a real problem around his home that lies at the edge of the Nairobi National Park in Kenya. After experimenting with various lion deterrents, he fitted a series of flashing LED bulbs onto poles around the livestock enclosure, facing outward. Since Turere rigged up his “Lion Lights,” his family has not lost any livestock to lions and his invention won him an invitation to the TED 2013 conference.
The African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC), is working with the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi to develop lesser-known food crops in Africa. The center provides scientists and technicians with a dedicated place to sequence, assemble and annotate the genomes to help develop food crops with higher nutritional value to better withstand climate changes, pests and disease.