Standard Bank partners Rhiza Africa on data-driven agricultural technology

Standard Bank has partnered Rhiza Africa in a bid to boost agricultural produce and increase famers’ yield, through innovation, driven by digital intelligence.

Standard Bank’s satellite hostedremote sensing innovation is delivered in partnership with service provider RHIZA Africa and backed by Origin Enterprises PLC and the European Space Agency.

About 60 per cent of the world’s uncultivated arable land presents is situated in Africa, which presents a major opportunity to meet the 70 per cent increase in global food demand expected by 2050. Africa also has potentials to grow through dramatically increasing its agricultural yields. However, Africa’s current dependence on traditional small-scale farming techniques returns the lowest yield per hectare globally.

While fertilizer, improved agricultural cultivation and livestock practices as well as better seed (biotech) can help improve yields, by far the biggest opportunity within the grasp of African agriculture lies in ‘agritech’, the intelligent use of data enabled by new digital technologies.

Data therefore presents an opportunity to further boost the yield for African agriculture.

According to

Abrie

Rautenbach,

Head, Agribusiness, Business Banking for Africa Regions at Standard Bank said: “Information is the key to realise Africa’s vast agricultural potential. Digital technologies are merely the tools that will deliver the information.”

As a result of the partnership, farmers and agronomists can take advantage of digital tools developed for the agricultural sector.

Speaking on the tools, Danie Swart, General Manager for RHIZA Africa said: “Contour is an aggregated remote sensing information platform with a complete suite of farm monitoring tools for farmers, whereas GRID is a digital service for financial partners and farmers that helps them grow together.”