# Agriculture 4.0: Is Sub-Saharan Africa Ready?
## 2 Prospects and Challenges for Agriculture 4.0 Adoption in Sub-Saharan Africa
### Finance and Capital for Investment, Research and Development  
Financial constraints and poor literacy are likely to affect the uptake of agriculture 4.0 technologies. Much of SSA's low-income rural population works in highly uncertain environments, with little access to capital, input and output markets, or crop insurance. These realities limit the ability of smallholder farmers to invest in \"modern\" technologies, especially those requiring upfront high-cost investments [55]. In addition, investment in agricultural research and development (R&D) as a percent of agricultural gross domestic product (GDP) in SSA is relatively low at 0.38% (2001-2013 average) and falling, and considerably lower than other regions in the world when measured per hectare of cropland or per agricultural labourer [7]. Importantly for agriculture 4.0, a digital infrastructure funding gap of about one billion euros exists in SSA [25]. This suggests a high degree of underfunding of agricultural research in Africa [24] with implications for technology adoption.  
Efforts by African governments to increase investments in agriculture are yet to reach targeted goals. For instance, the African governments launched the Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Program (CAADP) in 2006 that commits them to spend at least 10% of their total budget on agriculture by 2025. As of 2014, only Malawi, Zimbabwe and Mozambique had met or surpassed this target, with Zambia, Rwanda and Niger close to reaching the target [24]. And in 2017, only 20 out of the 47 reporting African Union (AU) countries remained on track to meet the 2025 commitments [25].  
Agriculture 4.0 technologies are generally perceived to be financially intensive [11], thereby making their deployment likely to be difficult for Africa's smallholder farmers. For example, \"next-generation\" nanosensor technology is being used to increase sustainable food production and better agricultural system in the United States of America and Australia [56; 57]. A fast speed method has recently been shown to increase chloroplast transformation in vitro with the potential of improving crop yields for crops such as arugula, watercress, spinach and tobacco [56]. These same technologies are being used for plant phenotyping and disease monitoring in the field [58]. Yet their cost of deployment makes them currently almost certainly inaccessible to African smallholder farmers.  
A study on the perception of Brazilian farmers regarding the adoption of agriculture 4.0 technologies such as precision agriculture integrated with data from remote sensors on smartphones found that the cost of the machines, software, equipment and connectivity was a constraint to adoption [59]. More generally, capital availability has also been found to be a pre-requisite to the adoption of conservation agriculture technologies, especially where new equipment is needed [60].  
Financial and agricultural advisory services technology start-ups such as Esoko in Ghana, Farmcrowdy in Nigeria, and EcoFarmer in Zimbabwe, which offer farmer advice on input use, credit and weather-indexed insurance, have received considerable attention in SSA [25]. For example, tech start-ups in these areas received investments of about 335 million Euros in 2018 [25]. These investments will create employment opportunities and increase uptake of the digital technologies [25]. This also suggests that financing agriculture 4.0 technologies, whilst still a constraint, may be less so in the future.