It’s early morning in Accra, Ghana. Darlington Akogo stands at the edge of a 20-hectare cashew farm with a drone controller in hand and eyes fixed on the digital bird slicing across the sky, scouting for trouble. In a few minutes, the drone will send back megabytes of imagery—leaf textures, canopy health, chlorophyll patterns—looking for signs of disease, poor growth, or nutrient deficiency.
But the real magic begins after the flight ends. That’s when Akogo’s agritech startup, KaraAgroAI, goes to work. “This tree is diseased,” he says, pointing to a red circle on his tablet. “And these rows here need more nitrogen.”
A few years ago, a diagnosis like this would’ve taken weeks—if it happened at all. Now, in a matter of hours, farmers in Ghana, Nigeria, and across the continent are getting something once unimaginable: instant, personalised, and predictive farm intelligence.
An agronomist with AI in its brain
KaraAgro AI was born from a simple but stubborn problem: Africa’s farmers are surrounded by data—soil, sun, rainfall, yield—but disconnected from insight. The startup, founded in Ghana, set out to bridge this gap.
When the startup launched, the team built a mobile app that let farmers take photos of their crops so the app could detect diseases. But the approach was limited. It still relied on farmers physically walking to affected plants, spotting problems manually.
KaraAgro pivoted to drone-based scanning, layering AI on top to automate disease detection, track maturity levels, detect water stress, and identify areas that require fertilisation. “The bottleneck is skilled labour,” said Akogo. “So you either have to train enough humans, or you create an AI system that contains this knowledge and make it cheap, accessible to farmers.”
Now, KaraAgro’s tools are being used by Ghana’s Ministry of Food and Agriculture, as well as the German development agency GIZ. In one project, their team travelled across all the country’s cashew-growing regions, training extension officers to fly drones and use KaraAgro’s software to interpret the data. “The farmer does not have to be the user of the AI system,” Akogo explained. “They are the beneficiaries of the insights.”
KaraAgro’s AI tools are also helping plant breeders create higher-yielding, disease-resistant seed varieties. “We’ve done this for cowpea, soybeans, and maize,” said the founder, describing how their drones scan experimental plots containing thousands of seed varieties. The AI then analyses those plots, helping breeders identify which ones perform best under local conditions.
On farms across the continent, Artificial Intelligence and drone technology like KaraAgro’s are becoming essential for farmers to diagnose crop diseases, estimate yields, and reduce fertiliser waste. These tools are not only helping farmers become more productive, but they’re also filling a critical gap in agricultural expertise on the continent.
In Nigeria, Integrated Aerial Precision (IAP) offers drone-enabled precision agriculture to everyone from Dangote Sugar to smallholder cassava farmers in Oyo State. With custom drones and AI-powered flight planning, the startup doesn’t just detect diseases, it treats them. Its drones can spray pesticides, broadcast seeds, and spread fertiliser with surgical precision. “We’ve seen farmers cut input costs by 30% while increasing yields,” said a spokesperson.
Where KaraAgro focuses on analytics and plant breeding support, IAP is building an end-to-end aerial farming system, from hardware sales to pilot training and AI-powered post-flight analysis. In areas with low connectivity, the system runs offline. AI models are compressed, quantised, and deployed via edge computing, making high-tech accessible even in areas without internet.
Both companies are tackling a critical shortage of skilled labour and know‑how amongst farmers across the continent.
Agriculture remains a cornerstone of the continent’s economies, accounting for approximately 16% of GDP on average and directly employing over 60% of the labour force. In several countries, this reliance is even more pronounced; for instance, agriculture contributes nearly 36% of Ethiopia’s GDP and employs 73% of its workforce.
Yet most of Africa’s farming is still conducted using rudimentary methods. Smallholder farmers, who often cultivate plots smaller than two hectares and produce up to 80% of the continent’s food, regularly struggle with low productivity, limited access to modern tools, and a severe lack of extension services and technical support. These constraints have made it nearly impossible for farmers to achieve the full potential of their land.
By integrating AI and drone technologies, KaraAgro, IAP, and other startups are working to fill that gap. Their tools diagnose crop problems and embed agronomic expertise directly into the field, offering scalable, tech‑enabled surrogates for labour that simply do not exist.
“You need agronomists, soil scientists, plant pathologists,” Akogo explained. “But we can’t train enough of them fast enough. So instead, we’re building an AI system that encodes their knowledge and makes it accessible at scale.”
This fact is not lost on governments across Africa. In June 2025, the Kenyan government announced a curriculum overhaul at the Kenya School of Agriculture to include AI, drones, and Big Data, a strategic step to modernise agricultural education and boost tech fluency among future agronomists. In Nigeria, the country’s apex IT agency, the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), is also looking to incorporate AI and drone technology, amongst other Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) technologies, to enhance food security.
The flight isn’t frictionless
But even for innovators, flight isn’t frictionless. A recent report by the GSM Association found that most use cases of AI in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa were in agriculture and food security. The report also noted that for the technology to deliver strong socioeconomic growth on the continent, there needs to be more efforts in tackling digital skills shortages and getting more smartphones in people’s hands.
For KaraAgro and IAP, low digital literacy amongst farmers has proven to be one of the biggest challenges. To solve this, both companies rely on human field agents to deploy drones and gather data.
In the future, Akogo sees a workaround where farmers don’t need smartphones, apps, or even digital literacy to benefit from AI. Instead, they’ll carry a small device with just two buttons. “You press one to collect the data, and the other to send it,” he explains. “Even if the AI works, it means little if farmers can’t operate it.
Beyond digital literacy, lack of funding is another hurdle for farmers in accessing AI and drone technology. The majority of African farmers are smallholder farmers and lack the scale or resources to afford the services of AI and drone technology companies like IAP and KaraAgro. In fact, both companies mainly serve middle to large-scale farmers.
For smallholder farmers, KaraAgro frequently offers services at subsidised costs, often with support from development agencies. “We group farmers in clusters based on proximity to each other and crop type so that they can access our services collectively at a reduced cost,” said an IAP spokesperson. “ We also work with farmer associations and other partners that can subsidise these services for smallholders.”While challenges are currently aplenty, both companies agree: this is just the beginning. In a few years, AI will be fully integrated across the entire farming cycle, from seed selection and land preparation to harvest forecasts and market pricing. “The real goal,” according to Akogo’s dream, “is a system that can detect a problem and fix it automatically. That’s where we’re going.”
Akogo’s dream is a lightweight robot left on the farm that scans crops, identifies issues, and treats them all without human intervention.
This report was produced with support from the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID) and Luminate.
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