IoT Sensing Platform for e-Agriculture in Africa

The importance of information and communication technologies (ICT) in small farm agriculture is unquestionable. This paper proposes an IoT Sensing Platform that integrates sensing and wireless communication technologies with soil image acquisition and computer vision to introduce e-agriculture in rural Africa. The proposed IoT sensing platform is part of Project AFRICA that aims at delivering small-scale precision agriculture to smallholder farmers, with special focus on women empowerment. This paper introduces the architecture for the IoT Sensing Platform defined, describes the different prototypes related to the proposed platform, and presents a preliminary validation carried out on a set of the developed prototypes in order to evaluate the viability of the considered sensing elements within the scope of Project AFRICA.