Smart Agriculture in Côte d’Ivoire: Huawei targets cocoa, cashew, and plantain 🇨🇮🌱

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Agriculture is the backbone of Ivory Coast’s economy. It accounts for 46% of the country’s jobs and contributes around 15% of its GDP. Against that backdrop, Chinese tech giant Huawei is now pushing to bring digital solutions into one of the continent’s most vital sectors — with an ambition that spans everything from weather forecasting to precision farm mapping.

Toward a digital agriculture 🌱

At the heart of this effort is the « Smart Agriculture » project — an advanced digital platform designed to help farmers anticipate weather events and map their plots with greater accuracy.

The initiative brought together Ivory Coast’s Minister of Agriculture, Rural Development and Food Production, Bruno Nabagné Koné, and a delegation from Huawei Côte d’Ivoire led by interim CEO Benoît Wu, in Abidjan on Tuesday, May 19. The project itself is not new: it was officially launched in 2023 at the International Agriculture and Animal Resources Fair (SARA). What this latest meeting signals, however, is renewed political momentum behind it.

A platform built for the fields 📱

In practical terms, the project aims to improve the quality of agricultural output across the country. With the platform’s tools, farmers would be better equipped to manage their land and increase productivity. Minister Koné has expressed his support in principle for the initiative, describing it as a strategic lever for accelerating the modernization of Ivory Coast’s agricultural sector. The government is also looking to deepen its cooperation with Huawei Côte d’Ivoire to support the project’s rollout at a national scale.

The stakes are high. Ivory Coast is one of the world’s leading producers of cocoa and cashew nuts — two crops the Smart Agriculture program explicitly aims to strengthen. Plantain banana production is also part of the project’s scope.

Two years after its official launch, though, the core question remains unanswered: at what scale will this project actually be deployed — and how will it reach the small-scale farmers who make up the vast majority of Ivory Coast’s agricultural workforce?

Can technology genuinely transform African agriculture, or are small producers at risk of being left behind? Share your thoughts in the comments.