Making Biologicals Viable: What Africa Teaches the World
From pioneering biological control to building agriculture’s missing data layer
By Camilla Porto, KRM, Latin America & Africa, GBL
Biologicals are precision inputs. Because they act on specific targets and stages, they perform best when the decision is right, and that precision starts before the drone or the GPS-guided tractor: timing, dose, tank-mix compatibility, and environmental conditions. When information is missing, results fall short, and the product takes the blame rather than the recommendation. In Africa, where technical assistance is scarce, the challenge is getting that information to the people who make decisions in the field.[cite: 59]
THE DIGITAL ASYMMETRY IS REAL AND ALREADY HAS AN INSTITUTIONAL ADDRESS
The most direct channel to the farmer is the mobile phone, and there Africa’s landscape is one of asymmetry. According to GSMA, 37% of the population had mobile internet in 2025 and about 1 billion people remain unconnected, even though the mobile sector generated US$240 billion, 7.8% of the continent’s GDP. Precision agriculture is advancing first in this connected segment, especially in export farming.[cite: 59]
A recent Springer review describes precision agriculture adoption in Africa as low and concentrated in a few countries. The institutional push, however, is already there: the African Union’s Digital Transformation Strategy includes the topic, the African Association for Precision Agriculture has been created, and heads of state have committed to delivering targeted agronomic recommendations to 70% of smallholders by 2034. It is this recommendation target, more than any machine, that brings the digital agenda close to the bioinputs agenda.[cite: 59]
MULTINATIONALS: CONSOLIDATION IN BIOCONTROL, CONNECTIVITY IN MACHINERY
Multinationals are moving in two ways. The first is the purchase of Kenyan biocontrol companies by European groups. In 2017, Belgium’s Biobest acquired Real IPM, founded in 2003 in Thika by Louise Labuschagne and Henry Wainwright. In 2021, Bioline Agrosciences, part of the InVivo group, bought Dudutech. In both cases, the asset was local production and research capacity, built to serve export floriculture and horticulture in the Rift Valley, and Kenya became a biocontrol base for the continent and beyond.[cite: 59]
In the second, machinery makers come in through connectivity and services. In 2022, John Deere made a minority investment in Nairobi-based Hello Tractor, a kind of app-based tractor rental: the owner registers the machine, fitted with GPS and a sensor, and the smallholder requests the service by SMS and pays for the area worked. The company says it has served more than 2.5 million farmers in 18 African countries, who mechanize their fields without having to own a tractor.[cite: 59]
In the biologicals market, concentration remains low: according to Mordor Intelligence, the five largest companies, including UPL, Certis and Koppert, accounted for about 20.2% of African biopesticide revenue in 2024. The market will grow from US$195.98 million in 2026 to US$320.3 million in 2031.[cite: 59]
FROM SATELLITE IMAGERY TO RECOMMENDATIONS ON A MOBILE PHONE
The toughest test came with the fall armyworm, Spodoptera frugiperda. Native to the Americas, it reached Nigeria in 2016 and, in just over two years, according to CABI, had spread to 44 African countries, with losses estimated by FAO at up to 17.7 million tonnes of maize a year. The continent already had a management response, icipe’s push-pull, but at a small scale: in 2014, it reached about 92,000 farmers. What was missing was getting information to the field in time.[cite: 59][cite: 60]
Early detection is already in the farmer’s pocket. The Nuru app, launched in 2018 by FAO with Pennsylvania State University, recognizes fall armyworm damage from a leaf picture, works offline and feeds FAO’s early warning system. Similarly, ProvEye and Self Help Africa built an algorithm that detects damage in satellite imagery with up to 87% accuracy.[cite: 60]
Biologicals depend on this. They act at the early stages of infestation and only work if they arrive within the right window; without an alert, they arrive too late and lose the comparison with curative chemistry.[cite: 60]
The case that links the two layers most directly is PRISE (Pest Risk Information Service), run by CABI in Kenya, Ghana, Malawi and Zambia with funding from the UK Space Agency. The service combines Earth observation, weather and pest life-cycle data, calculates when to act and sends the alert by SMS, together with CABI’s Pest Management Decision Guides. In Kenya, maize growers who received alerts harvested 2,089 kg/ha, against 1,988 kg/ha for the others, and earned 18,020 versus 15,733 shillings per hectare. All without a single sensor in the field.[cite: 60]
In Kenya’s export floriculture, data and biologicals already work together. In Crop-Scanner, Real IPM’s app, the scout enters observations on a phone and gets back the pest curve and the natural enemy curve, so the decision to release a biocontrol agent rests on a data series. In February 2026, Florensis Kenya, a Naivasha nursery with about 14 hectares and more than 400 employees, replaced manual insect counting with optical sensors from the Dutch company PATS, which track moths, whiteflies and thrips. The driver is Europe’s zero tolerance for pests, and the route chosen was data-calibrated biological control, not a chemical escalation.[cite: 60]
There is also a less visible layer. The CABI BioProtection Portal brings together, free of charge, more than 7,000 registered biocontrol and biopesticide products for about 2,900 crops, in 54 countries and 18 languages. African farmers rarely lack the bioinput itself; the hard part is finding out which product is registered in their country, for their crop and their pest. No sensor solves that.[cite: 60]
THE BOTTLENECKS TECHNOLOGY DOES NOT SOLVE
Registration remains the main brake. Even in Kenya, which has one of East Africa’s most advanced frameworks for biopesticides, with the Pest Control Products Board and the Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Service, a 2026 review in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems points to costly registration, slow approval, formulation restrictions and low farmer awareness. Add regulatory fragmentation between countries, a weak cold chain and higher upfront costs than synthetics.[cite: 60]
None of this is solved with hardware. The digital gain will come less from sensors and more from recommendation systems, traceability and proof of efficacy that reduce the information gap between manufacturer, reseller and farmer.[cite: 60]
In markets such as Brazil, the United States and the European Union, digital agriculture grew on the back of connected machinery, in parallel with biologicals, and only recently have the two agendas started to meet. Africa is taking the opposite route: it is building the information layer first, with mobile phones, open satellite data and cheap artificial intelligence, and using it to make biologicals viable where demand already exists. All on an agronomic base that, as push-pull shows, has never stopped being biological.[cite: 60]
For the bioinputs sector, inside and outside Africa, this points to a market-entry model for regions with little technical assistance: the product comes with recommendations. In bioagriculture, precision is a condition for performance.[cite: 60]
BioAg World Digest | Summer 2026
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