199 – The Pan-African Convening on the Future of Biodigital Technologies in Food and Agriculture

[00:00:07] James: Hi everyone, welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I am James Musyoka and I’m here today with David Stern, the founding director of IDEMS. David, you were telling me about an interesting event that you attended last week. So tell me about it. What was it about?

[00:00:26] David: This was the Pan-African convening on the future of biodigital technologies in food and agriculture. It was held in Addis and organised by AFSA with a number of partners and supporters, but AFSA, the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, being the organising partner. And I must say from my side, it was inspirational.

[00:00:51] James: It sounds, the name of the event sounds very big. Could you break it down? What was the objective of this meeting basically?

[00:00:58] David: Well, it was the first meeting of its kind. There have been a lot of digital advances in recent years. There’s a big push to get digital technology into agriculture and to have it advance agriculture. And this was a meeting which was designed to really investigate, well, is this going to really help shape this? From a food sovereignty perspective because this is the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa.

They were wanting to take that lens and say, you know, what should we be doing about biodigital technologies? How should we be using AI for and in agriculture in Africa? And it was really inspiring just the people who were in the room that they’d managed to get there and to be part of that was such a privilege.

[00:01:49] James: That sounds interesting.

[00:01:51] David: Maybe let me just break down, because one of the things it’s come out with that will be released very shortly is a declaration. So we as the members of it, well, I was more a supporting member, but the members were putting together through the course of the three day event, this declaration about what is it that we feel this Pan-African collaboration should be doing about digital technologies in Africa for agriculture.

And there’s a statement which I thought was very interesting, which is so central to all this, which is that with all the efforts that are happening, is enough happening so that there is not loss, there isn’t exploitation of Africa, just like its minerals have been exploited, its people have been exploited in the past? Is its data going to be taken out and exploited? Data, genetic resources, digital infrastructure.

If we think of African sovereignty, sovereignty within Africa, are we going to be able to have systems which enable African nations, institutions, to have control, to have a form of collective control of their own data, genetic resources, digital infrastructure, et cetera.

And this was a really, really interesting question, which I don’t think is being asked enough. And so one of my big takeaways from this meeting is that this is a human rights issue in many ways. There’s real issues around sovereignty, which the food sovereignty movement recognise affects food sovereignty if your data, if your ability to have the digital infrastructure, if all of that is not homegrown, then you are risking all sorts of different issues which affect food sovereignty. So these are really intertwined with one another.

And that was very powerful how that came out together.

[00:04:06] James: You mentioned about sovereignty here and, yeah, the philosophy, it seems to be the same as, I think, what we have been involved in in the African data Initiative. It’s interesting.

[00:04:18] David: You are absolutely right. That parallel is really interesting. You started that sort of a decade ago.

[00:04:23] James: Yes.

[00:04:23] David: In a very different context in some sense. And maybe we should do another episode on that at some point soon. But this idea that was central that you put forward 10 years ago, that if we are going to have software to work with data, it needs to be developed on the continent for people who understand the problems, by people who understand the problems for people who have the problems so that it actually is adapted to those, to their needs.

[00:04:53] James: Yeah.

[00:04:54] David: And a big part of your data initiative was about sort of trying to get data sovereignty in different ways in terms of the tools as well as in terms of the data itself.

[00:05:05] James: Exactly, yeah. So it does draw parallels with that.

[00:05:09] David: Absolutely. And one of the things which is very interesting, and I want to give credit here to somebody who I met for the first time but was so impressed with, he’s called Million Belay and he presented right at the beginning of the conference. And one of the things that I took away and love from his presentation is he had this beautiful slide, it was very simple, but it said, you know, if we think about how technologies are being developed into the future, there’s broadly three ways.

One way is the current venture capital models of digital technology creation, which are creating highly profitable businesses, and centered on profit extraction from digital technologies. A second way, which I’ll come back to. And a third way, which is sort of emerging that he pointed to, which could be where digital technologies are actually more geopolitical tools where they become, you know, who uses which technology is almost a political statement.

They’re divisive technologies rather than at the moment, I would argue most technologies are global, but more and more there is this potential risk that he’s observing and that he sort of has drawn attention to, that we could see a future where there are political forces and technologies across that divide, where certain countries, certain people use some technologies and other people use other technologies based on political factors. So the technology stopped being this unifying force.

No, that’s, I’m saying the wrong thing to say it stopped being a unifying force, but technologies have been seen as sort of universal tools, whereas he’s saying the third way technologies could develop is they become more and more separated by geography and by political forces.

And so, he was arguing that that first and that third way, they weren’t serving the people in the way that he wanted. What he was saying was there’s this second way, which is a sort of collaborative, collective ownership of technology. And he articulated this in a way where I thought, yes, that would be wonderful, but it doesn’t exist yet. What would it take to make this collaborative co-ownership approach to technology exist?

And so he put forward that if we could follow as societies this second way of developing technologies, then the technologies could serve humanity in different ways, and society much more than the first or the third approach. It was a very, very powerful moment for me, he was articulating this simple choice between three ways forward in terms of the development of technologies, and you could categorise pretty much any effort into these three ways.

And when I looked at that second way that he was promoting, I thought this is what we need, but I don’t know that anyone knows how to do that and how to actually promote that because it’s not just open source. You know, many people would take what he saw and see open source as part of that.

But it’s not just open source, what he was saying was much more than that because it had local ownership in a ways that the moment open source doesn’t have the capacity to enable. It could in theory, but in practice there’s skills level barriers, which sort of stop it. And these things were, it was so clear that as a society, I don’t think we yet know how to follow that second way.

[00:08:50] James: It’s interesting. David, you mentioned about ownership, you know, communities being involved in building technologies, and that helping sort of people, those communities, those technologies serving the communities. Isn’t this what we’ve been trying to do with R-Instat?

[00:09:05] David: You are right, and it’s also where I believe, some of our failures on that, what I’m now seeing is these are systemic failures about how technology is built. You know, when we started collaborating on R-Instat, it was designed to be locally owned in Kenya, through the team of people that you built up and your colleagues there.

[00:09:26] James: Yeah, exactly.

[00:09:27] David: The INNODEMS team in particular, we should single them out.

[00:09:30] James: Yeah.

[00:09:31] David: You know, they’d come after R-Instat, but they’d been built out at the people who were developing R-Instat at the beginning.

[00:09:37] James: Exactly.

[00:09:37] David: And the idea was local ownership, but right now IDEMS has ownership really, legally, because the repository is now an IDEMS repository. It’s an open source repository, but we took responsibility for it a few years back because it needed an injection of effort and that couldn’t be done as easily through the partners, you know, through your colleagues in Kenya.

[00:10:05] James: Yeah, yeah.

[00:10:07] David: And so we took ownership of it, made a fork, and we are now the lead fork where all the development’s happening, to help the project move forward. And what I now recognise coming back to this is if only Million’s second way existed, we wouldn’t have had to take ownership, we would’ve had mechanisms to have co-ownership where it sort of developed in a much more collaborative way.

But to move the project forward, somebody has to drive it. And we took that responsibility on. And so it’s something where I believe, I don’t think we did the wrong thing.

[00:10:46] James: Yeah.

[00:10:46] David: But I would’ve been so much happier if we hadn’t had to take ownership, but there were ways to have this co-ownership, which were much better established that would’ve enabled that collaboration to take a different form.

And I think this is exactly what I believe Million’s vision entails, and exactly where I believe that, this is an open source project, so even within the open source community, we have to be changing the way we think about ownership to achieve the sort of collaborations that Million put forward and that I think this Pan-African convening has suggested.

[00:11:25] James: Yeah, I see the challenges that actually, I think, that are in technologies, the way you’ve explained how now IDEMS is leading R-Instat. So I was wondering, what do you think is the way forward? Is it that there’s no capacity in Africa? What exactly is the challenge and what do you think would, you know, would lead sort of communities getting ownership of these technologies?

[00:11:47] David: You know, as well as I do that the capacity in Africa is amazing and the potential there is huge. However, I do believe that the ways that we need people to be thinking deeply about what I’m gonna call Million’s second way, you know, this alternative approach to thinking about technology, technology ownership, co-ownership at different levels with different groups.

And I don’t, you don’t often hear me saying this on the podcast because I’m quite confident in quite a lot of it, I don’t yet know. I think this is something where I’m really so impressed that AFSA has brought this up, they’ve raised it, they’ve got people to start to think about it. I think it’s the start of the discussion. There were people there where there have been some amazing discussions which have started on, well, what might this look like?

[00:12:39] James: Yeah.

[00:12:39] David: But I’m excited to see where it goes. I don’t know is the simple answer to your question, what should we do? I’m really hopeful that people like yourself will get involved in this question, people like Lawali in Niger, who’s been working on the Fuma app, they should be brought in because he’s been building technology for a farmer federation in Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world.

I think this was one of the examples I was able to bring out at the meeting, of this is an example of what should be happening everywhere, but for it to happen everywhere, the systems need to change.

[00:13:17] James: Yeah.

[00:13:17] David: At the moment it’s happening in isolation in particular places. But if we could actually change the systems of building technology so that these rare initiatives of technology or technological approaches emerging from African context locally, could be happening much more and could be then leading to these much more powerful…

I mean, the reason IDEMS took over R-Instat is because it’s no longer important just for Africa, it is important for everyone. And that ability to then take it and actually make it really useful in other contexts, that required a different level of investment, a different set of skills, which IDEMS could bring to the table.

It wasn’t that we took it over because it wasn’t good enough or whatever, we took it over because we had the skills to help it achieve more and to help it reach its potential. Its roots were very much African, but its potential is global. And that’s what we wanted to see. I think the phrase you coined a decade ago was you wanted things to come out of Africa rather than just going into Africa.

[00:14:24] James: Exactly, for Africa. And I must insist that actually, yeah, IDEMS is leading the R-Instat development. But, you know, the Africans are still in it, it’s more like working together.

[00:14:35] David: Absolutely. There’s now, as well as the team in Kenya, there’s another team in Ghana who are also contributing. So we’ve got, you know, there’s these different teams and organisations working together, it’s absolutely collaborative.

[00:14:46] James: Exactly.

[00:14:46] David: But I do come back to, I wish we had a better set of tools to be able to do that collaboration in ways where more ownership could be taken locally.

[00:14:59] James: Exactly.

[00:14:59] David: This is the reality, there weren’t the funding streams coming into INNODEMS or GHAIDEMS for them to really step up and take the ownership, take the software to the next level. The work we’ve had recently with the CGIR centers developing R-Instat, that would not have been possible through INNODEMS or GHAIDEMS, and yet we as IDEMS were able to include both INNODEMS and GHAIDEMS in that work. And because we had the ownership that made the whole thing possible.

That’s the reality of some of these funding streams at the moment, but that’s exactly what I believe Million highlighted, we need this other way and this other way of developing this, which makes these things possible in more collaborative ways.

We shouldn’t go on, we’re sort of out of time. But I guess the thing I do want to just mention again is I’m so impressed with the people who were in the room. And this was a Pan-African convening, and there were just so many different perspectives, but there was clearly so much knowledge in the room and this awareness of the importance of working together across the continent.

Because although there were so many different contexts, and those contexts were highlighted, you know, some of the differences were huge and they were highlighted. But the issues of food sovereignty and data sovereignty, and the risk of extraction. This is common across the continent.

[00:16:31] James: Yeah.

[00:16:31] David: And so the Pan-African approach is just so powerful. I just want to finish saying thanks again to AFSA, the collaborators, which include Afritab, the ETC group, for organising it and for inviting me to be part of such an amazing event.

[00:16:51] James: Yeah, it’s interesting. Let’s see where the discussions go.

[00:16:54] David: Thank you and thanks for this podcast. I’ve enjoyed it.

[00:16:57] James: Yeah, thank you David.