WECONNECTFARMERS is a digital agriculture platform launched at the Farmers Forum hosted by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) Rome in February 2020. It was developed as a digital agriculture platform in the context of the Family Farming decade in West Africa (2019-2028) .
This platform connects farmers and young agripreneurs together to share good practices, modernize agriculture and break the digital divide.
The objective is to encourage the adoption of technology to improve production and agricultural incomes. The intent is to identify and bring together the digital farming tools available and allow farmers in Africa to access them more easily through this repository and their phones/computers. The digital ecosystem is growing fast in West Africa with the emergence of start-ups, incubators, digital labs. This emergence is followed by the development of many apps mainly adapted to the context of a country. These apps are widespread and existing stakeholders in rural development know few of them. Hence, there is a need to connect and coordinate all this emerging technology using multi-stakeholder approach.
The platform is divided into 4 levels: (i) exchange, community of practice and trainings; (ii) data analysis: big data from (production, weather, economy, satellite images) from international and local organisations; (iii) agritech apps accessible from smartphones. These apps cover all agriculture and livestock sectors and can help your business; (iv) market place and economic intelligence for farmers.
The platform is managed by different institutions (farmer organisations, telecom operators, research institutes, etc.) and volunteers from projects and farmers organisations in each country covered, starting with West and Central Africa.