By: Dr. Daniel Kyalo Willy
MONTPELLIER, FRANCE
Global experts in the Bioeconomy converged at the French Historical city of Montpellier to discuss the current issues around the development and deployment of Biobased solutions that are useful in the energy, feeds and Agricultural sectors. One question lingered: is Africa ripe for these solutions? Africa is home to more than 300 million rural residents, most of who depend on biomass-based products for food, fuel and feed. The rural areas face a critical dilemma of energy shortages and ironically also generate large amounts of Agricultural waste that end up as environmental hazards despite the fact that they can be used to generate the power they so badly need.
To address this dilemma, scientists from Europe and Africa have spent the last 3 years developing, testing and piloting biobased technologies that have the potential to transform rural livelihoods in Africa through simple, scalable and locally adapted solutions. Funded by the European Union, the Biostar and Bio4Africa projects are driving these innovations. The African Agricultural Technology Foundation is part of the Bio4Africa Consortium, that is coordinated by CIRAD.
The Biostar project was designed to address limited access to energy by SMEs in Africa that are not connected to the National grid and therefore face challenges of inconsistent supply of Energy which they need for transportation, processing and storage. SMEs also produce waste that are normally dumped in environmentally unfriendly ways. These waste can be used to generate power that can be used to solve the energy challenge faced by the SMEs.
The Bio4Africa project has tested and optimized solutions such as densification, pyrolysis and green biorefinery that are used to produce fuel products such as Briquettes, high quality livestock feed pellets as well as biochar, a product used as a fertilizer for soil quality improvement. These technologies have been tested in Senegal, Uganda, Ghana and Ivory Coast and have potential to be replicated in other countries in Africa.
These biobased solutions hold great potential for transforming livelihoods in Africa as well as driving the circular economy in the continent. To ensure successful commercialization and scaling of these solutions on the continent, a few lessons can be drawn from the conversations at the Bioenergy for Local Production International (#BLP2025) Conference in Montpellier, France held earlier in January 28-30, 2025.
Lesson #1: Local co-creation and adaptation matters
Most of these innovations have been done in other parts of the world. Importing the technologies to the continent will require careful adaptation to local conditions in the respective countries. The innovations have to be co-created with the rural users to ensure success in their acceptability.
Lesson #2: Private sector-led business models will drive sustainable adoption
To ensure wide scale usability of the innovations, the private sector is critical in commercializing and driving the use of these technologies beyond projects. Sustainable commercialization requires that we adopt business models that take into consideration the role of the private sector, integration between the different actors and reliance of local expertise in the maintenance and fabrication of equipment.
Lesson #3: Successful commercialization needs policy support
Many innovators of bio-based solutions may fail in the market due to policy related issues. Deployment of technologies face challenges related to the policy and regulatory environment that innovators may face such as taxes on machines and parts, lack of quality standards to drive marketing and limited research and development funds to ensure improvement and maintenance of the innovations.
The Author is a Senior Manager, Policy Agribusiness and Commercialization at AATF and Interim Managing Director of Agridrive Limited. He can be reached through: d.willy@aatf-africa.org
