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Swedfund Invests $12 Million to Strengthen Climate-Resilient Agriculture and Food Security Across Africa
The financing will support businesses providing essential services to smallholder farmers, including improved access to agricultural markets, affordable finance, digital technologies, quality farm inputs and post-harvest infrastructure.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Viewpoint: Why African Agriculture Must Prepare for its Nana Benz Moment
African smallholder farming is facing a succession crisis that threatens the loss of generations of accumulated knowledge.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Rize Secures $31 Million Series B to Expand Low-Emission Rice Network in Vietnam and Indonesia
Rize works with farmers to adopt Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD), an irrigation technique endorsed by the International Rice Research Institute and CGIAR that periodically drains paddies rather than keeping them permanently flooded.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Environment
- Region
- South Asia
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The Flawed Assumptions Behind AI for Agriculture: What Artificial Intelligence Can — And Can’t — Do for African Farmers
There is a dominant mental model of AI for agriculture. According to Sheena Raikundalia at Kuza, the pitch goes something like this: “What if every farmer had a personal AI advisor telling them what to grow, when to plant and how much fertilizer or other inputs to apply?” That model is sleek, frictionless, and built on the assumption that farmers are operating alone with the algorithm, receiving personalized recommendations and optimizing their decisions accordingly. But as she argues, optimizing agriculture in Africa is not primarily an information problem: It is a trust problem, a market access problem, a collective action problem and a financing problem — and addressing those challenges requires a human connection. She explores Kuza's experiences offering an AI chatbot to Kenyan farmers, and shares lessons on how best to leverage both human and digital resources to support smallholders in Africa.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Technology
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Acumen’s ARAF Fund Raises $90 Million to Take Its Climate-Resilience Playbook to North Africa
ARAF aims to deliver direct impact to at least an additional 4m farmers with the fresh capital, managed by Acumen Capital Partners, a wholly owned subsidiary.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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The Blind Spot in the EU’s New Deforestation Regulations: Laws and Satellites Don’t Save Forests — People Do
The European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) represents an ambitious legislative effort to protect our planet’s remaining forests. But Priscillia Moulin at MosaiX highlights a potential flaw in the regulations: To meet the EUDR's data requirements and prove that their supply chains are deforestation-free, major commodity buyers are turning to remote sensing and satellite AI — and if these technologies detect any tree-cover loss, the path of least resistance is often to permanently exclude that supplier. She argues that this creates the illusion of compliance while pushing vulnerable small farmers into the grey market, as satellite algorithms can identify changes in forest cover but cannot determine intent or causality, or assess other complex realities on the ground. She proposes three ways companies can comply with the EUDR without freezing smallholders out of the EU's premium, regulated markets.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Environment
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Analysis: When “Sustainable” Quietly Means “Without the Farmer”
We are watching the early industrialisation of food categories that have, for centuries, been grown by smallholders in the Global South. The sustainability story we tell about it is real. It is also incomplete in a way that matters.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Global
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Kenya’s Terrafy Launched to Build Parcel-Level Land Intelligence for Africa’s Rural Finance Markets
The platform combines field data, geospatial intelligence, verification workflows, and monitoring systems to create institution-ready land records, turning informal land into bankable, monitorable, monetisable assets.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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