Google and the Gates Foundation have announced an expanded initiative to bring artificial intelligence (AI) tools to 200 million smallholder farmers across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia

The programme will provide support for climate forecasting, agricultural productivity and resilience, backed by more than US$100mn in combined funding and dedicated technical expertise from Google researchers.

Announced on 18 September, the multi-year initiative aims to extend the reach of existing AI applications from 50 million farmers to 200 million, focusing on climate adaptation and food security. Funding, research and engineering assistance will support organisations developing and deploying these solutions at scale.

“No matter where they farm, people deserve access to the weather, crop, and soil information that can mean the difference between a good harvest and a failed one. When that information reaches farmers at scale, it’s transformational for their families, their communities, and their economies. We’re proud to work with Google, agricultural partners, and governments across Africa and South Asia to put AI to work solving a problem that climate change is making more urgent,” said Mark Suzman, CEO of the Gates Foundation.

“Our collaboration with the Gates Foundation is about turning the extraordinary potential of computational science into solutions that can make a real difference in people’s lives,” said Maggie Johnson, global head and vice-president of Google.org. "That means going beyond building AI for the Global South to building it alongside the people and communities it is designed to serve. Together, we’re connecting frontier AI with the farmers who feed a third of the world.”

Smallholder farmers operate more than 500 million farms worldwide, most covering less than two hectares, and produce nearly 35% of the world’s food. However, many remain vulnerable to unpredictable weather and lack access to satellite information, financial services and public support that could help them manage agricultural risks.

The Gates Foundation and Google will build on several initiatives to address these challenges.

Strengthening local innovation

The programme will provide funding, computing resources and technical assistance to researchers and innovators working within local ecosystems. Partners include Wadhwani AI and Digital Green in India. The approach aims to ensure that local expertise, data governance and intellectual property remain rooted in the regions where solutions are developed and implemented.

Delivering more precise local weather forecasts

Although meteorologists have access to sophisticated forecasting tools, smallholder farmers often lack weather information detailed enough to guide decisions at individual farm level. The initiative will help bridge this gap by integrating advanced AI forecasting into TomorrowNow, a climate platform co-funded by the Gates Foundation, the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) and Google.org.

Improving the identification of smallholder farms

An estimated 85% of agricultural holdings worldwide are smallholder farms. Their relatively small and irregularly shaped plots can be difficult to distinguish using conventional satellite imagery. As a result, farmers may face difficulties verifying land ownership or cultivation cycles when seeking government programmes, insurance or subsidised agricultural inputs.

To address this challenge, the initiative will build on Google’s Agricultural Understanding Platform, a suite of AI foundation models developed for farmers, government agencies and businesses. The platform is designed to map field boundaries at sub-metre resolution and track crops throughout the growing season.

Google combines satellite imagery from third-party providers with AI to identify smallholder plots and crops, reducing reliance on expensive manual surveys. Meanwhile, the Gates Foundation is funding partners involved in local imagery collection and working with agricultural ministries and CGIAR research centres to prioritise important staple crops.

The Agricultural Land Use (ALU) data layer, one of the most accessed layers on Google Earth and part of Earth AI, already covers India, Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia. Further deployments are under way in Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Rwanda, Zambia and Nigeria. This information can help farmers receive more tailored weather alerts and access additional assistance, including government credit programmes.

Advancing agricultural research and technology

The combined US$100mn commitment is also supporting regional research and infrastructure. This includes collaboration with CGIAR to accelerate the development of crop varieties capable of withstanding drought, heat and disease.

Another priority is improving access to agricultural information in local languages. The initiative will support the development of open-source speech and text datasets covering more than 40 African languages, working with regional networks such as the Masakhane Research Foundation and Digital Umugunda.

These organisations, alongside numerous other partners, will share expertise and coordinate progress through the AI Collaborative: Food Security. The initiative recognises that tackling complex agricultural challenges requires cooperation between technology developers, researchers, governments and local organisations.

Through this expanded partnership, Google and the Gates Foundation aim to turn advanced AI research into practical tools that help farmers manage climate risks, improve harvests and strengthen resilience. By investing in regional institutions, infrastructure and expertise, the programme also seeks to ensure that AI solutions can be deployed widely while being developed and sustained by the communities they are intended to serve.

The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) has secured a licence for CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology, marking a significant step towards advancing food security and climate-resilient agriculture across smallholder farming communities in Asia and Africa

Gene editing offers researchers a way to develop improved crop varieties more quickly than conventional breeding, which can take many years to combine desirable characteristics. The technology can help accelerate the development of crops with greater tolerance to drought, heat, pests and diseases, alongside improvements in productivity, nutritional quality and other traits valued by farmers. It does so without introducing DNA from unrelated species.

The humanitarian licensing agreement with Corteva and the Broad Institute creates new opportunities to develop improved seeds for smallholder farmers across Asia and Africa. By accelerating the development of crop varieties better equipped to withstand extreme weather, including droughts and floods, the technology could support farm productivity, strengthen rural livelihoods and help meet growing food demand without requiring additional agricultural land.

Acknowledging Corteva and the Broad Institute for their leadership in enabling the agreement, ICRISAT director general Dr Himanshu Pathak described it as a transformative humanitarian milestone for the institute and the millions of smallholder farmers and their families who rely on dryland agriculture.

"Broad’s and Corteva’s leadership in gene editing, combined with ICRISAT's world-leading breeding programs and our other long-standing partnerships with national agricultural research systems, this new capability will accelerate the delivery of practical crop innovations that strengthen food security, improve livelihoods and build more resilient agricultural systems across Asia and Africa,” said Dr Pathak.

The licence covers the full research and product development pathway, enabling ICRISAT to develop new gene-edited solutions across its mandate crops. These include sorghum, pearl millet and other millets, chickpea, pigeonpea and peanut.

The agreement also builds on ICRISAT’s established capabilities in genomics, crop breeding, phenomics and seed systems, alongside its partnerships with national agricultural research organisations. Together, these strengths create an integrated innovation pipeline designed to move scientific discoveries into improved crop varieties for farmers’ fields more efficiently.

Dr Wendy Srnic, vice-president of biotechnology at Corteva, welcomed the collaboration and its potential benefits for smallholder farmers.

"We’re proud to collaborate with ICRISAT and help smallholder farmers across Asia and Africa access gene editing technology,” said Dr Wendy Srnic, vice president, biotechnology for Corteva. “We look forward to working together to develop crops that can better withstand extreme weather events, pests and diseases and help farmers feed their communities while building a more resilient global food system.”

At the Africa Food Systems Forum in Kigali in September, more than 5,000 delegates representing over 50 countries considered a fundamental question: what tangible difference does investment make?

The discussion highlighted that Africa already has evidence of effective solutions. By Sofia Tesfazion, IRRI regional director for Africa

The challenge now is to establish the conditions needed to finance, implement and expand these initiatives by linking proven approaches with supportive policies, institutions, funding and markets to deliver lasting results. As CGIAR noted in Kigali, impact depends on science, evidence, policy, delivery systems and finance working together to move innovations beyond pilot projects and towards wider adoption.

Rice is central to this wider discussion.

Rice has become one of Africa’s most important and rapidly evolving food and economic commodities. Across sub-Saharan Africa, demand is rising faster than for any other staple, and the region accounts for approximately one-third of global rice imports. Africa’s annual rice import bill, estimated at more than US$6bn, illustrates both the size of the market and the opportunity for local farmers and businesses to capture greater value through stronger domestic and regional rice value chains.

It is encouraging that discussions about rice are increasingly moving beyond production volumes to consider the broader systems required to connect more than 35 million African smallholder rice farmers with markets. These include access to reliable seed, irrigation and water management, mechanisation, finance, processing, quality standards, logistics, market information, employment and trade.

These priorities align with the African Union’s CAADP Strategy and Action Plan 2026–2035 and the CAADP Kampala Declaration. The framework aims to increase agrifood output by 45%, reduce post-harvest losses by half, triple intra-African agrifood trade and mobilise US$100bn in investment. It also highlights the need to ensure that investment benefits farmers and businesses while helping keep food affordable for consumers.

Agricultural transformation requires commercially sustainable and resilient value chains that create value for everyone involved. Farmers, businesses, financial institutions and markets need to operate as connected parts of the same system. Examples of this approach are already emerging.

During the Kigali forum, six countries, Nigeria, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Ghana and Sierra Leone, launched the US$500mn West Africa Rice Investment Facility. The ECOWAS Bank for Investment and Development committed US$100mn. The initiative aims to combine public and private investment to support financing, agricultural inputs, processing capacity and private-sector partnerships throughout the rice value chain. It also builds on the ECOWAS Regional Rice Roadmap 2025–2035, demonstrating how West African countries are working collectively to shape their regional rice agenda.

However, Africa’s rice sector cannot be developed through a single model. Countries have distinct production systems, market conditions, constraints and objectives, and several are already demonstrating the results of targeted national strategies.

Tanzania has progressed beyond rice self-sufficiency, recording a self-sufficiency ratio of 112% in 2023/24 and supplying neighbouring countries. Ethiopia has designated rice a National Flagship Program. According to the country’s Ministry of Agriculture, smallholder rice cultivation expanded from 60,000 to 1.7 million hectares over five years, while imports declined by two-thirds.

Kenya is pursuing an irrigation-led strategy. Through its Rice Intensification Project, the National Irrigation Authority (NIA) aims to address the national rice deficit by increasing annual paddy production from approximately 300,000 tonnes to one million tonnes. It is expanding and rehabilitating irrigation schemes in coastal and western Kenya to bring more land into rice production.

The rehabilitation of schemes including Mwea, Ahero, Lower Kuja and South West Kano helped raise paddy production from approximately 192,000 tonnes in 2022 to around 305,000 tonnes in 2025. Farmers, millers and seed producers have also adopted Komboka, a high-yielding variety developed in collaboration with IRRI and the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO), following their involvement in its selection.

Recognising these national differences is essential to building partnerships around priorities identified by individual countries. Continental cooperation can help connect national experiences and strategies, while the African Union’s Agenda 2063 provides a long-term framework for transformation through sustainable development, regional integration, trade, science and technology, and private-sector growth.

Against this backdrop, the Global Rice Policy Dialogue, scheduled for 15–16 October in Addis Ababa, will bring together African and Asian perspectives. The event is co-hosted by the African Union’s Department of Agriculture, Rural Development, Blue Economy, and Sustainable Environment (ARBE) and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), in partnership with AfricaRice and the CGIAR Policy Innovations Science Program. It is co-organised with the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR).

The Dialogue will give policymakers and experts an opportunity to examine how national decisions on rice production, competitiveness, reserves and trade influence markets across borders. Discussions will also consider practical approaches to building more resilient and predictable rice markets.

Participants will explore how countries can strengthen their rice industries while balancing sustainable production, competitiveness, farmers’ livelihoods, consumer interests, reserves and trade amid growing market uncertainty. The Dialogue also aims to establish a shared platform for examining the cross-border effects of national policies, testing potential responses to market shocks and identifying practical measures for national implementation and voluntary regional coordination.

Kigali placed the spotlight on what investment can change. In Addis Ababa, the focus for rice will be on making that change sustainable. Progress will depend on science, effective policies, strong systems and cooperation working together, enabling African countries to strengthen the growth and competitiveness of their rice sectors and navigate an increasingly interconnected global rice market on their own terms.