[1]: The caveat is that heavy mechanization is capital intensive and since labor costs are lower in Africa the optimal mix of mechanization will be different than in the US. It also leads to centralization and larger farms which is sometimes undesirable for political/cultural reasons.
In terms of cell phones, neither.
I know people who tried to push on with various cross-border activities virtually during COVID, some of which involved quite a lot of people spread out across Africa.
TL;DR it didn't work out that well.
African colleagues kept on dropping out of remote sessions because of various issues with local infrastructure (e.g. unpredictable local power supply killing cell masts).
But also there was a lot of feedback that Western style cell contracts with generous data allowances are either non-existent or atrociously expensive. So a lot of people just plain couldn't be online for long sessions and had to drop-in here and there.
We have the east coast to think about all that silly stuff
If only there would be more and somewhat orchestrated innovation happen, I think many issues could be fixed.
Investment in Africa would be better served by listening more to underprivileged Africans that have not had access to the same opportunities and capital. Microfinance to support this demographic would be more effective and impactful than investing in an angel syndicate supported by these sort of blog posts.
Rather the vagueness reflects an interest in exploring solutions. That's normally what blogs / essays are like aren't they?
There is a cottage industry of people claiming to do projects to help Africa. With marketing via blog posts geared towards those with access to capital, these projects can be funded. And since it is about Africa, there is less scrutiny about how effective it really is. Superficial facile accolades along with wining and dining at global events can further obfuscate this reality.
Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) [1] was and is "active" in most African countries in the past 15+ years :-)
North Africa is already on the verge of food security collapse. Rest of Africa is not further from it.
$150 barrel oil imposing massive input costs is going to take global south straight to Famine.
