While some African countries could be reported to have benefited fully from their agriculture industries, some countries are not realising the full benefits. Instead, we continue seeing countries becoming more and more impoverished.

Agriculture sector the world over is said to be the backbone of every nation’s economy. This is because, as compared to other industries such as mining and others, agriculture in non replenishable. The production of good abundant crops helps produce and maintain a country’s food security and contributes towards a nation’s economic performance.

Therefore society needs to utilise its agriculture industry to improve its economic standards by employing workable strategies that could address the challenges of this sector.

Overview of agriculture sector in Africa
While some African countries could be reported to have benefited fully from their agriculture industries, some countries are not realising the full benefits. Instead, we continue seeing countries becoming more and more impoverished.


When it comes to making agriculture work, Southern African countries such as Zambia have their own problems. For instance, most indigenous farmers in Zambia are small scale farmers and do not have the capacity to farm big, as they do not have adequate farming inputs such as fertiliser and seeds. This has resulted in a situation where serious commercial agriculture is pursued mainly by wealthy people especially, foreign investors who enjoy the monopoly of the business.

Lack of information about markets where they could sell their produce is another problem faced by small farmers. This is usually in the case of the farmers who stay in far-flung areas where there is severe crisis of communication. In most rural areas, there is no ICT infrastructure. At some places even if Internet is present, it is either expensive or rural dwellers do not have the skills to use it. Some unscrupulous business people have taken advantage of this and tried to coax the farmers into selling their produce at throwaway prices. The lack of communication infrastructure is a problem faced by most African countries. Though there are rural areas, which are slowly getting connected through ICT’s like phones, TV, and Internet but largely the potential of ICTs remains untapped. Today, ICT’s hold the key for bringing transformation in the society.

ICTs can help local farmers in gaining access to international market. e-Commerce can help both the seller and the buyer to communicate in less time and use Internet to carry out a transaction. Farmers can research on new types of products and search for information about ways in which they could package their produce better.

If a farmer is effectively able to use ICT’s, he stands to benefit more than one who is unable to. This is because, soon there will be a situation where the farmer would not even have to go looking for the market but people would easily contact him and make their orders and the farmer would eventually be transformed from a local seller to a large international exporter.

From this transformation, the nation and the youths would benefit as more jobs would be created with increase in demand, more production and enhanced efficiency. This would also help retain the youths in rural areas as they would get work in the farms and their need to relocate to the cities would be decreased.