As extreme weather reduces crop yields and drives farmers off the land, Africa’s agricultural players are gradually adopting climate-smart technologies, despite lagging the rest of the world in financing and expertise.
“Both the farmer and food consumer could face hunger disaster,” Shamiso Mupara, an organic food regeneration entrepreneur, says of the FAO’s assessment that agricultural yields across Africa could decline 50% by 2100 if temperatures increase between 1.5-4ºc in this century.
Africa’s agricultural processes have hardly evolved significantly to address the climate emergency. Financing for climate-smart agriculture remains limited, with major donors such as the World Bank providing small amounts, such as $40 million in March 2024. Climate-smart agriculture is crucial not only for the continent’s domestic food security but also for external factors, explains Mupara. For example, exports to the European Union, the most lucrative market for Africa’s farmers, would soon only enter the bloc if they comply with specific international regulations like the EU Deforestation Regulation and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism.
“Thus, climate tech is key for food traceability from farm to table,” she says. With this in mind, in 2025, there has been urgency around climate-tech smart farming initiatives that are powering resilience across the continent.
We have found three of the most exciting innovations, from floating solar plants firming South Africa’s farms to solar-powered irrigation systems transforming agriculture in arid Botswana.
South Africa’s floating solar plants on farms
Despite South Africa producing 229-234 TWh (Terawatt-hours) of electricity, making it the continent’s power-generation leader, electricity blackouts are taking a toll on harvests, cold storage, and irrigation systems.
However, South Africa’s farmers are taking the initiative, with 10% of the country’s solar PV capacity now installed in the agricultural sector. A brilliant example is Radley Landgoed Farm in the country’s eastern Mpumalanga province, home to the largest coal-fired power plants. At this family-owned farm, a massive 3,350 square meters of solar panels are installed on the surface of the farm’s largest irrigation dam, powering 1.8 GWh and sustaining everything from staff quarters to 536ha of sucrose-producing sugar cane to 105 breeding cows. This is the largest solar-floating system in South Africa.
“These types of private ‘water-borne’ solar plants underline the country’s progress towards sustainably financing farm-based renewable energy mini-grids,” Mooketsa Ramasodi, director of the South African agricultural ministry.
Botswana’s eco-smart farming collectives
Botswana is one of Africa’s most semi-arid countries, resulting in imports accounting for 60% of its fresh vegetables and fruits. But in recent years, Botswana has been relying on climate-smart agrotech to reduce its substantial food import bill. One such example is Kwenantle Farmers, the biggest grassroots farming enterprise in the country, producing beans, lucerne and white maize. They have taken advantage of the country’s considerable solar irradiation potential to install 1MW of solar output on their farms, thus reducing energy for production costs by 65%, says Lesego Osman, the head of business at Standard Bank Botswana, the country’s leading financier.
The cooperative’s solar plant networks have driven a significant increase in crop production, from 6,150 tons to 7,850 in just a year.
“Kwenantle is focused on greening agriculture in Botswana – turning desert-like conditions into greenbelts of crops and animals raised sustainably,” says Obonye Mmereki, the cooperative’s Principal.
Zambia’s satellite drought monitoring
The worst drought in the last 100 years, driven by the El Niño weather pattern, hit Zambia in 2023-2024, reducing staple maize production by 53%. Severe food insecurity led 84 of Zambia’s 114 districts to declare a hunger crisis.
The Zambia Drought Monitoring System (ZADMS), developed by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) for Zambia’s Ministry of Agriculture, aims to turn the tide by digitizing early warning systems so that farmers at the grassroots level can be proactive in managing droughts. In the past, effective drought hedging in Zambia was complex due to the time-consuming, slow, and expensive tasks of mapping the threat and the computing power required to parse weather and agricultural data. The ZADMS addresses this by standardizing all data needed to monitor drought through a single open-source portal, accessible to any farmer or citizen with an internet-connected device.
Though technology can’t completely prevent drought, it can make government and farmers avoid costly, misinformed decisions, says Mark Smith, IWMI’s Director General. For example, if advanced satellite data indicate a drought is on the way, authorities can, in advance, import higher quantities of food at lower prices to help farmers and citizens get through the season, or increase irrigation infrastructure to help farming communities withstand climate shocks.
Adoption of climate-smart agrotech is urgent for Africa, says Mupara, because according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Africa bears a disproportionately high cost for basic climate adaptation compared to Asia, the Americas, or Europe, despite contributing just 3-4% of CO2 emissions.
“Climate-proof agrotech, in Africa, is the difference between impoverished farmers who may never return to the land, or resilient livestock and crop yields that feed domestic consumers and earn forex billions,” she says.
