In cassava farming communities across Nigeria, farmers have started responding to the word “AKILIMO” with a simple phrase: “We Know Cassava.” For many farmers, the phrase reflects a growing sense of confidence in a crop that has long been central to household survival.
Cassava is the food security crop of West and East Africa. For more than 800 million people globally, it is a daily staple. Yet for the smallholder farmers who produce most of it, the crop’s potential has remained largely under-realized. Most farmers were producing below 10 tons per hectare, less than half of what cassava is biologically capable of yielding. For years, production depended heavily on guesswork and inherited knowledge. Farmers planted based on experience, applied whatever fertilizer was available, and waited months before discovering whether the harvest would succeed. The absence of data-driven advisory systems, localized recommendations, and timely extension support further limited farmers’ ability to optimize productivity and manage risk effectively.
The challenge: A structural deficit with human costs
Cassava also carries a burden that shorter-cycle crops do not. The wait between planting and harvesting can stretch to nine or ten months, leaving farming households with little income and limited food during the gap. Many farmers either sold green, immature cassava at a loss simply to put food on the table or borrowed against future harvests at punishing rates. The long growing cycle created a cash flow problem that agronomic advice alone could not solve.
Agricultural extension systems were also struggling to meet demand. In many parts of Nigeria, a single extension officer was responsible for as many as 15,000 farmers, against a national policy target of one officer to 800 farmers. Most smallholders never received site-specific advice on fertilizer application, weed management, planting density, or harvest timing. AKILIMO was developed to help close that gap. Weak rural advisory systems, limited extension coverage, and poor access to localized decision-support tools further widened productivity gaps among smallholder farmers.
The solution: AI as an extension agent for millions
Led by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), the platform emerged after years of engagement with processors, farmer cooperatives, input suppliers, and aggregators across Nigeria and Tanzania. The team identified recurring challenges and narrowed them into five focus areas that, if solved together, would unlock the rest: a fertilizer blend tuned specifically for cassava, intercropping cassava with maize so households had food and income during the long wait to harvest, scheduled planting tied to optimal starch content for processors, best planting practices, and weed management. The maize intercropping recommendation, in particular, transformed the economics of the cassava year by giving farmers a harvest at three months instead of ten.
To build the solution, researchers established more than 5,000 farmer-managed trial sites across Nigeria and Tanzania. Farmers were not the audience for the science; they were the scientists. The data collected from these sites became the foundation for an AI-supported advisory platform capable of generating location-specific recommendations.
An advisory that meets farmers where they are
Today, AKILIMO functions as a digital agricultural advisory ecosystem. Farmers provide information about their location, farm size, and crop management practices, and the platform generates tailored recommendations on fertilizer application, planting spacing, intercropping, weed management, and expected profitability.
The platform is designed to work through channels that farmers already use. Recommendations are delivered through WhatsApp, SMS, interactive voice response, a smartphone application, and printed advisory materials. The AI chatbot, currently live in Nigeria, understands English, Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, and Pidgin English, with additional local language expansion underway. A farmer can type a question or simply speak it in any of these languages, and the response comes back as text, an audio clip, or a short Nollywood-style instructional video that can be replayed and shared. The team learned early on that farmers retain advice far better when they can both hear it and see it.
Accessibility has been central to AKILIMO’s design. While the chatbot requires internet connectivity, the mobile application itself can function offline, which is especially important in rural areas with unstable network access.
One extension worker recalled introducing AKILIMO in a community where very few people owned smartphones. Farmers gathered around a single device for hours, taking turns asking questions and receiving responses from the platform.
| “They were not just listening. They were asking their own questions and getting their own answers. That changed everything about how they saw it.” |
| — Dr Thompson Ogunsanmi, AKILIMO Scaling Specialist and Coordinator in multiple countries |
What the numbers say: Impact at scale
| 700,000+ Unique farmers reached across Nigeria, Ghana & Tanzania | 2 million+ Advisory interactions recorded | 9,000+ Extension agents trained across three countries |
Beyond advisory support, Akilimo has also evolved into a broader ecosystem that links farmers to input providers, processors, aggregators, and buyers. Fertilizer companies such as Notore Chemical Industries now produce and sell the cassava blend the platform recommends. Off-takers such as Psaltry International Limited extends input credit to a trusted network of farmers and route them through AKILIMO content before each planting season. Aggregators such as Zowasel purchase the harvested produce, playing a marketplace function within the platform to helps farmers connect directly with buyers instead of relying entirely on unreliable intermediaries.
The scale of adoption has been significant. AKILIMO has now reached more than 700,000 unique farmers across Nigeria, Ghana, and Tanzania, with over 2 million recorded advisory interactions. Nigeria leads with roughly 240,000 unique farmers; Ghana has around 140,000, with the balance in Tanzania. Seventy-three percent of farmers who have been introduced to the advisory are actively putting at least one recommendation into practice. More than 9,000 extension agents have been trained to support implementation, and nearly 200 organizations now integrate the platform into their operations.
The evidence of impact is increasingly visible. In Nigeria, cassava yields have doubled from the baseline the team established at the start of scaling, and farmers using the advisory report a 33 percent improvement in profitability after deducting all input costs. Tanzania has recorded yield gains of around 27.6 percent, and Ghana around 22.8 percent. Weed management has now overtaken fertilizer use as the single most adopted recommendation, as global fertilizer supply has tightened. Market access has also expanded dramatically. In 2021, only 23 percent of surveyed farmers reported reliable access to output markets. By 2024, that figure had risen to more than 90 percent.
Women farmers have shown particularly strong engagement with the platform. Although women account for just under 39 percent of total users, they represent nearly half of farmers who changed their farming practices after receiving recommendations, meaning women are translating advice into action at a higher rate than men.
The partnership model: The secret behind the numbers
AKILIMO’s engagement model is also an important part of its success. Rather than functioning solely as a standalone digital advisory tool, the platform operates through strategic partnerships with fertilizer companies, Farmer-Based Organizations (FBOs), processors, aggregators, NGOs, and agricultural programs that integrate AKILIMO into their own farmer support systems.
This partnership-driven structure allows the platform to scale through existing agricultural networks while embedding advisory services directly into real farming and market systems. This creates incentives for long-term sustainability. Input companies benefit when farmers adopt improved fertilizer practices. Aggregators benefit from higher-quality cassava supply. Farmers benefit from advisory support, market access, and improved productivity.
Plans are now underway to extend the platform beyond cassava. Maize and rice are the next two crops on the roadmap, both are shorter-cycle crops with stronger business cases for partners, and demand is being driven by the same fertilizer companies, off-takers, and aggregators that have built their operations around AKILIMO’s cassava advisory. The same four-recommendation framework, the same multi-channel delivery, and the same partner ecosystem will carry across.
Some challenges remain. Internet connectivity continues to limit full access in some communities, and farmers still face difficulties accessing recommended inputs locally. Building trust also takes time, especially in communities where farmers have previously experienced failed interventions or exploitative schemes.
AKILIMO shows what can happen when artificial intelligence is built around practical farming realities, local partnerships, and field-tested evidence. At a time when extension systems across Africa remain overstretched, the model offers one possible way of expanding access to agricultural knowledge for millions of farmers.