Technology Adoption for Precision Agriculture in Africa: a bibliometric analysis

Precision agriculture has a massive potential for growth in Africa, but it faces a number of social-economic and technological challenges. This paper synthesises research on adoption of technology for precision agriculture, investigating the fear versus love for technology in general and the current level of technology usage in the continent of Africa. The precision agriculture domain uses technology such as the Internet of Things, which can help the farmers to mitigate the impact of climate change on their agricultural productivity. This paper utilises the primary and subsidiary keywords related to technology adoption in precision agriculture to query the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus database. After screening for relevance and exclusion of duplicate documents, 470 research papers from 2018-2023 related to the keywords inputted were analysed using R-Studio Bibliometrix tools. Firstly, the study analysed the foundational data acquisition and secondly, the study analysed four contextual areas that both the emerging and established researchers in the field of precision agriculture are exploring and which can be explored further, especially in Africa continent. Based on the analysis results presented in this study, it can be argued that despite the urgent need of technology adoption in agriculture to guarantee food security, the participation of Africa continent researchers in this domain is still very low. The findings also reveal that some of the major factors contributing to the low level of participation by the Africa continent are research funds and collaboration strategy. The author recommends that some dedicated research funds should be allocated specifically for precision agriculture research by both the government and the private sectors in the continent of Africa. Also, more research collaborations between the Africa continent and the North America continent, which is the leading continent in this research field should be encouraged.