Advancing Sustainable Agricultural Practices in Africa with AI

This report documents the AfriCHI 2025 workshop, “Advancing Sustainable Agricultural Practices in Africa with AI,” held on 4 November 2025 in Cairo, Egypt. The workshop brought together researchers, practitioners, agricultural organisations, technologists, and community partners to examine how artificial intelligence can support sustainable, inclusive, and context-sensitive agricultural innovation across African farming contexts. The report synthesises workshop presentations, participant questions, case studies, position papers, and reflection-session insights. It focuses on the socio-technical conditions that shape agricultural AI in practice, including multilingual and multimodal interaction, low-resource language constraints, infrastructure limitations, mediated advisory systems, farmer agency, gendered labour dynamics, indigenous and experiential knowledge, and climate variability. Drawing on cases from AI-enabled advisory systems, hydroponic grow tents, participatory plant breeding, audio-based farmer learning, and community-led outgrower models, the report identifies recurring design and deployment challenges. It argues that responsible agricultural AI in Africa must go beyond technical accuracy to address trust, actionability, social feasibility, ecological adaptability, and alignment with farmers’ knowledge systems. The report sets out an agenda for future research, design, and deployment, highlighting priorities such as multimodal interaction, participatory knowledge integration, climate-aware modelling, low-bandwidth and shared-device use, farmer-centred evaluation, and cross-institution collaboration. It is intended for researchers, designers, agricultural technology practitioners, development partners, policymakers, and funders working at the intersection of AI, agriculture, sustainability, and human-centred design in African contexts.