The Innovate Africa Challenge (3rd Edition), organized jointly by the Smart Africa and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations is a continental initiative aimed at accelerating the deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions to address climate and agricultural challenges in Africa.
The 2026 edition is themed “From Ideation to Deployment”, emphasizing the transition from innovative concepts to practical and scalable solutions that deliver measurable benefits to farmers.
Why the Challenge Matters
Africa’s agrifood systems face significant challenges, including:
At the same time, advances in AI, digital agriculture, and data-driven technologies offer major opportunities to improve productivity, resilience, sustainability, and market access. However, many promising solutions remain at the pilot stage and are rarely integrated into national agricultural systems or deployed on a scale.
Previous Editions
Previous editions of the Innovate Africa Challenge demonstrated the potential of AI to support climate action and agriculture by:
Despite these achievements, many innovations are still developed without sufficient validation in African smallholder farming contexts, which limits their adoption at scale and their ultimate impact.
What this Edition Aims to Achieve
The Third Edition seeks to identify and support a proven AI-driven solution for Climate-Smart Agriculture and deploy it within a Smart Africa Member State. The selected solution will be implemented in partnership with:
- National ministries responsible for Agriculture, ICT, and Innovation
- The Smart Africa Secretariat
- FAO country offices and technical experts
Specifically, the challenge seeks to:
Expected Outcome
- Deployment of a Scalable and Context-Validated AI Solution
One (1) Proven AI-driven solution customized to African agricultural realities will be deployed, validated, and demonstrated in real-world settings. This will result in measurable improvements in farmers’ decision-making, productivity, and climate resilience, laying a clear foundation for wider adoption across Member States.
- Strengthened Ecosystem and Multi-Stakeholder Collaboration
The initiative will catalyze stronger partnerships among innovators, government ministries, FAO country offices, the private sector, research institutions, and farmer organizations. By fostering an enabling environment and ecosystem linkages, the collaboration will help break down silos, promote knowledge exchange, and build capacity for sustained digital transformation in agriculture.
- Evidence Generation and a Replicable Model for Scale-Up
The challenge will generate robust evidence and lessons learned from the deployment process, creating a replicable model for scaling AI innovations in climate-smart agriculture across the continent. This will inform policy, guide investment, and accelerate the adoption of responsible AI solutions, amplifying impact for African farmers and food systems.
Scope of the Challenge
Primary Focus Areas:
The challenge will place particular emphasis on solutions addressing:
- Precision agriculture and input optimization to improve resource efficiency and reduce environmental impact;
- Crop yield prediction and forecasting to support proactive planning and food security;
- Pest and disease surveillance, detection, and early warning; enabling timely responses and minimizing losses;
- Climate risk modeling and adaptive decision support, to strengthen resilience to climate variability and shocks; and
- Water and natural resource optimization.
Deployment and Validation
Expected Solution Capabilities
Participating startups are expected to demonstrate solutions that produce reliable, actionable outputs for farmers, extension services, or agricultural institutions.
The proposed solution should demonstrate the ability to operate effectively in environments characterized by:
- Smallholder and informal farming systems;
- Partial, incomplete, or low-frequency datasets;
- Mobile-first and low-connectivity settings;
- Multi-language and heterogeneous data environments;
- Diverse agro-ecological zones and farming practices;
- Integration with national extension and ministry systems.
Eligibility Criteria
The challenge is open to startups, innovators, and solution developers actively developing or deploying AI-driven solutions for climate-smart agriculture. Applicants must demonstrate not only technological maturity but also a strong commitment to strengthening the innovation ecosystem, contributing to measurable impact, and showcasing viable pathways to scaling and financial sustainability.
This call is only open for applicants coming from Ghana ,Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda and Uganda.
Applicants must meet the following criteria:
Rules and Principles
All participating startups must:
- Comply with applicable data protection and privacy requirements in the countries of operation;
- Apply responsible and explainable AI practices appropriate to agricultural decision-making;
- Demonstrate bias identification and mitigation, particularly across gender, geography, and farming systems;
- Respect farmer data rights and obtain appropriate consent for data use;
- Maintain the confidentiality of all information shared under the challenge.
Smart Africa reserves the right to define and enforce additional data governance and responsible AI requirements throughout the challenge.
Participants shall retain ownership of pre-existing intellectual property.
However:
- Smart Africa shall retain rights over challenge outputs, reports, and frameworks developed under the initiative;
- Any subsequent scale-up or deployment phase may be governed by separate contractual arrangements defining ownership, licensing, and deployment rights
