Abidjan, Ivory Coast

Monday, July 28, 2025

In a cultural center in Abidjan, dozens of Ivorian students divided into teams are thinking hard, stopwatches in hand: during a competition, they must build robots to imagine the future of agriculture, a sector that has been shunned by young people until now.

The competition is part of a broader trend to integrate technology into agriculture, a pillar of the Ivorian economy. Dominated by cocoa, rubber, and cashews, agriculture accounts for nearly half of the working population.

“My passion for robotics has increased my desire to improve the conditions in which my parents used to farm,” Pélé Ouattara, 20, a student at the Félix Houphouët-Boigny National Polytechnic Institute (INPHB) and the son of farmers, told AFP.

A few meters away, on the opposing team, Urielle Diaidh, 24, is enrolled at the Polytechnic University of Bingerville. “Without new technologies, agriculture risks dying out,” she said.

Mechanization remains below 30% in this sector, and the aging workforce is struggling to renew itself, according to the National Agricultural Research Center (CNRA), which announced in May that it would be integrating new technologies into its programs

“Agriculture 4.0,” the theme of the competition, “is improved agriculture, enhanced through new technologies, whether robots, drones, artificial intelligence, or data processing, which will help farmers,” says Paul-Marie Ouattara, 27, a digital transformation engineer for a private company and the initiator of the competition.

Surrounded by small white robots moving around on tracks, he says he sees “a real interest among young people in this Agriculture 4.0.” In Côte d’Ivoire, which is hosting its first tech fair, Ivoire Tech Forum, this month, 75% of the population is under 35.

– Lightening the load of “arduous” work –

At the Ministry of Digital Transition and Digitalization, Stéphane Kounandi Coulibaly, director of innovation and the private sector, notes an “increase” in the number of start-ups specializing in “agritech”—the name of this rapidly growing global sector—often led by young people.

This trend is also observed in Benin, Nigeria, and Kenya.

In cocoa, for example, of which Côte d’Ivoire is the world’s leading producer (40%), “we have noticed the emergence of new technologies over the past four or five years,” notes Thibeaut Yoro, secretary general of the central union of cocoa producers.

He reports the use of new machines to lighten “arduous” work involving “archaic practices.”

“We dig, we clear brush, we harvest with machetes,” he laments. As a result, farmers complain of “back pain and fatigue, and they can’t work for long periods of time,” he says.

“These are things that can be changed with new technologies,” says Mr. Yoro, but for whom?

To spray pesticides, purchasing a 10- or 20-liter drone can cost 3 or 9 million CFA francs (US$4,573 or US$13,720), respectively. That is 3 or 9 times the six-month income of an average farmer who owns one hectare and 500 kilograms of cocoa, according to the price set in April.

Ivorian companies are offering to lower the cost by renting out their services.

In the green countryside surrounding Tiassalé, 125 km from Abidjan, Faustin Zongo hired a company to spray his passion fruit field with pesticides using a drone: 10 minutes and 15,000 CFA francs (US$22.8) per hectare.

With traditional methods, “it takes two days for one hectare,” he says.

– “Optimized yield” –

At his side, the project manager for Investiv, the company Zongo hired, confirms that precision agriculture, based on technological equipment often imported from China, makes the sector “more attractive.”

“More and more young people are returning to the land and coming to us,” says Nozéné Blé Binaté, 42.

The company Jool offers data analysis using software, starting at a few tens of thousands of CFA francs (a few dozen euros).

In his offices on the outskirts of Abidjan, the company’s founder, Joseph-Olivier Biley, a 32-year-old farmer’s son, is enthusiastic: his software, he boasts, makes it possible to “know what to plant, where, and how,” “detect diseases before they spread,” and even anticipate yields, “optimized by more than 40%.”

Humaniterre with AFP