The Kenya Meteorological Department has confirmed what we all know: the short rains are failing. While this may be viewed as just another Kenyan weather report, this is true for most of Africa and in indeed the world. It is actually a continental economic and humanitarian alarm bell especially since most of African agriculture is rain fed. For Africa, adaptation is a local, immediate, and non-negotiable reality. The era of predictable seasons is over. In this reality, any agricultural strategy still based on waiting for the rain is a strategy for bankruptcy and famine.

Smallholder farmers are estimated to produce 70% to 90% of the food supply in sub-Saharan Africa. The long-held belief was that Africa must consolidate land into large, mechanized mega-farms to achieve efficiency and scale. Yet, here we are and smallholder farmers are still feeding hundreds of millions of people.

The most significant debate in Africa's energy development had been whether centralized grid extension or decentralized minigrids will work for rural electrification. More governments now target generation of new power to drive industrialization and the need to attract Big Tech & AI projects. The question of extending power to low-consumption rural areas becomes an even lower priority, financially and strategically.

Despite all this, the climate crisis is the single greatest catalyst for the modernization of African agriculture. Technology will now be a necessity and means of survival. This forced adaptation is creating a huge market opportunity for ventures that can deliver resilience. As we embrace the end of seasons, food security and better livelihoods will be driven by smallholder farmers who will be powered by decentralized solar.

I am making this case mostly from the Kenyan perspective and I appreciate that most of the other countries in the continent suffer from other core issues such as inadequate transport infrastructure. Kenya has some of the best road networks in Africa which makes it critical for domestic and regional trade. There is however, a lot of work to do on the last mile to improve the unpaved rural roads that smallholder farmers depend on to move their produce to market. For most of Africa, this situation is much worse and it is important that this point is not ignored.

End of Seasons

The most damaging impact of climate change on Kenyan agriculture is not the decrease in rain but the shift in the bi-modal rainfall pattern that created the two rainy seasons: Long Rains and Short Rains. The data from the Kenya Meteorological Department and other verified sources shows that the seasons have been affected in four critical ways:

1. Shifts in Onset and Cessation: The start of the Long Rains (historically March-May) has become increasingly delayed, sometimes by weeks or even a full month. This leaves smallholder farmers planting in dry soil, leading to immediate crop failure or poor germination. When the rains finally do come, they often end abruptly and earlier than expected, cutting short the vital grain-filling stage of staple crops like maize, which severely reduces the yield per acre.

2. Rainfall Frequency and Intensity: Studies show a statistically significant decrease in the number of wet days (rainfall frequency) across the country over the last few decades. The rainfall that does fall tends to be concentrated into very short, heavy, high-intensity showers. This causes a lot of surface Runoff and flash flooding.

3. Increased Inter-Seasonal Droughts: In the past, poor seasons were generally localized or followed by a recovery season. Over the last decade, Kenya has seen prolonged, multi-year, consecutive seasons of failed rain.

4. Correlation with Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD): The severity of Kenya's climate extremes is heavily linked to two ocean-atmosphere phenomena: Negative IOD (La Niña) and Positive IOD (El Niño). These two suppress rainfall and drive extreme flooding respectively in the Horn of Africa.

The end of seasons means a destruction of planting schedules, increased input waste and harvest damage. This essentially transforms smallholder farming into a high stakes, low return gamble that they are likely to lose every time.

Smallholder farmers

Smallholder farmers, who are typically categorized as those who cultivate plots of land smaller than two hectares, account for up to 80% of the farming population in sub-Saharan Africa. These small farms often dedicate a greater portion of their land to producing food crops for human consumption, compared to larger farms that focus more on cash crops, animal feed or biofuels. This underscores their vital role in food security and the overall economy of the continent.

The debate has always been that for Africa to have food security, there is need to end the smallholder system and focus on mega-farms. The evidence however shows that the future of a resilient African food system lies not in centralization, but in distribution. With the end of seasons, it is a network of technologically empowered smallholders that presents the superior system for climate adaptation. We can build this on three truths.

First, System Resilience. During the building of what we call the internet today, a critical technology called packet switching ensured resiliency. If one node of the internet is knocked out, it would not break the whole thing. Similarly, a distributed network of 10,000 industrialized one-acre farms is inherently more resilient to localized weather changes or a new pestilence than a single 10,000-acre monoculture. When one node in the network fails, the others persist. It is a self-healing system, capable of adapting and surviving shocks that would otherwise bankrupt a centralized entity.

Second, Efficiency. The premise that big farms are more efficient is flawed. Large industrial farms are more efficient in labour-per-hectare. However, multiple studies including from the World Bank, have shown that small, family-owned farms are often more efficient in yield-per-hectare, especially for diverse, high-value food crops. This ties in the fact that most of Africa is capital-scarce but labour-rich. Therefore, the most effective model is one that maximizes the productivity of the land, and evidence shows that intensive, well-managed smallholdings often outperform large farms in this regard.

Third, and most importantly, The Power of Entrepreneurial Pull. The most resilient and dynamic economies in the world are not built on large companies; they are built on a distributed network of small, agile businesses. Similarly, the most critical intervention is not in technology, but in empowering the farmer to see their land not as a subsistence plot, but as a factor of production in a business. The pull from a farmer-SME who sees a clear and undeniable ROI for a new piece of technology is the most powerful and sustainable scaling force on the continent.

In summary, the best-bet strategy of investing in smallholders and AgriTech is directly validated by this information. Since the seasons are no longer predictable, these smallholder farmers need technology to overcome the new reality of volatile, unreliable, and intense weather events. The pull must however come from them.

Solar

This distributed network of farmer-SMEs, that is incorporating technology, is a practical reality powered by two specific energy shifts.

Energy independence through solar is the foundation of on-farm resilience. It provides the clean, consistent power needed for the core tools of adaptation such as precision irrigation.

Ecosystem power integration via solar minigrids is the next step for rural communities. They will not just to power homes but will become the processing and value-addition hubs for the local agricultural ecosystem. This is the core infrastructure that connects the network. These minigrids will power the shared cold storage facilities, the efficient milling operations, and the packaging centers that dramatically reduce post-harvest loss and connect a network of empowered smallholders to higher-value, more distant markets.

To resilience and adaptation

Empowering this distributed network of farmer-SMEs is not just a social good; it is the most resilient, capital-efficient, and profitable path to securing Africa's food future. Only then can the demand for agricultural technologies grow to enable them feed the next billion.

This will drive capital flows to the scalable technology providers: the companies building the energy-efficient solar irrigation systems, the data platforms that deliver actionable insights, the farmer insurance solutions, the affordable cold chain solutions, the processing machinery and the minigrid infrastructure that will power the new rural economy.

That is how we will invest in resilience and adaptation. That is the winning strategy for the next decade.

Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash