Divisi
Our Mission
The Goal Isn't Downloads.
It's a Better Harvest.
Divisi exists to close one gap: the smallholder farmers who grow most of Africa's food are the ones with the least access to the agronomy that would help them grow more of it. Here is why we built it, what it changes, and what we will and won't claim about that.
What does "Divisi" mean?
Divisi (dee-VEE-see) is a Shona word for a charm believed to protect a farmer's land and multiply the harvest — a force of abundance and protection. We carry that name forward as a free, digital divisi for the modern farmer.
Why We Built Divisi
Smallholder Farmers Have Always Deserved Better
Across Sub-Saharan Africa, millions of smallholder farmers make high-stakes decisions every season with almost no reliable information. When to plant. Which variety survives the dry spell. What that yellowing leaf actually means. Whether this week's rain is enough or more is coming.
Extension officers are stretched dangerously thin — one officer for every 2,500 farmers in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. Generic crop guides are written for commercial operations, not 1-acre plots. And most digital tools assume reliable internet, high-end phones, and spare cash — none of which describe the reality for 500 million smallholder farmers producing 70% of Africa's food.
We built Divisi to close that gap: real farming advice in every farmer's pocket, free forever, and designed to work on a budget phone in the middle of nowhere.
Theory of Change
Most Yield Gaps Are Decision Gaps
A smallholder farmer in Sub-Saharan Africa often harvests a fraction of what the same field could produce. The reasons are rarely mysterious: a crop that was never suited to that soil, a planting date missed by three weeks, fertiliser applied at the wrong growth stage, a pest identified after it had already taken the crop, a storm nobody saw coming.
Each of those is a decision made without information. The information exists — in soil and climate datasets, in agronomic literature, in weather models — but it has never been delivered to the person holding the hoe, in their language, for their specific field, on the phone they already own.
Divisi's whole theory of change is that one sentence. Put the right decision in front of the right farmer at the right moment, free, and the harvest follows.
Crop Advice for This Field
Crops ranked by the soil, terrain and climate of the farmer's exact plot — not a national average. Two fields in one district can get different answers, because they are different fields.
Season Monitoring & Weather
Planting windows tuned to the season actually happening, and 7-day forecasts for the farm's own coordinates — with warnings before a heatwave, storm, flood or dry spell arrives.
Every Task, With the Reason
Land prep to storage: the right task at the right moment, why it matters, and how to do it — plus a diary and ledger that outlive any exercise book: durable digital records, with photo attachments you can review years later.
SDG Alignment
Where Divisi Sits in the Global Goals
Two goals are the core of the work. Eight more follow from it. Each card names the specific target, not just the goal number.
Zero Hunger
Targets 2.3 — double the productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers · 2.4 — resilient agricultural practices
This is the goal Divisi was built for. Crop suitability is scored from the soil, terrain and climate of one farmer's actual field, so the season starts with a crop that can succeed there rather than one that was popular at the market. From planting onward, every stage carries the specific task, the timing and the reason behind it — the agronomy an extension officer would give, if there were enough of them.
Climate Action
Target 13.1 — strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards
Adaptation, for a farmer, is a run of small timely decisions. Divisi watches the forecast for one field and warns before a heatwave, storm, flood or dry spell arrives — with the prevention steps that fit the crop and its current growth stage. Planting windows shift with the season that is actually happening, not the one the calendar remembers. Losses avoided are worth as much as yield added, and they arrive faster.
No Poverty
Target 1.5 — build the resilience of the poor to climate and economic shocks
For a farming household, one failed season is the shock. The farm ledger shows what each crop actually cost and earned, so next season's choice is made on the household's own numbers instead of on hope — and early weather warnings stop a single storm from erasing a year's work.
Gender Equality
Target 5.a — equal access to economic resources and agricultural services
Women do a large share of the farming across Sub-Saharan Africa and reach formal extension services least often. Advice that costs nothing, needs no membership and no travel, and works on a shared budget phone removes several of the barriers at once. We do not yet report gender-disaggregated reach — see the measurement note below.
Decent Work & Economic Growth
Target 8.2 — higher productivity through technological upgrading
Farming becomes a business when it is measured like one. A season of diary entries and ledger records is also the first financial record many smallholders have ever held — the kind of evidence a buyer, a co-operative or a lender will actually look at.
Reduced Inequalities
Target 10.2 — empower and promote inclusion regardless of economic status
Most agricultural software quietly assumes a good phone, steady data and a card. Divisi assumes none of them: it is offline-first, light enough for a budget Android handset, and available in English, Shona, Swahili, French and Yoruba. Nobody is priced or signalled out of it.
Clean Water & Sanitation
Target 6.4 — substantially increase water-use efficiency across all sectors
Agriculture accounts for roughly 70% of the freshwater withdrawn worldwide, and on a smallholder farm most of it is applied by habit — a fixed day of the week, or whenever the furrow looks dry. Divisi works out what the crop actually needs at its current stage and whether the coming rain will cover it, so irrigation answers the crop rather than the calendar. Water not applied is water left in the ground.
Responsible Consumption & Production
Target 12.2 — sustainable management and efficient use of natural resources
Guessing at inputs is expensive in both directions: too little fertiliser wastes the seed, too much wastes the money and runs off into the water. Divisi gives amounts and timings matched to the crop, the soil and the target yield — and identifies a pest before the response is a blanket spray.
Life on Land
Target 15.3 — combat land degradation and restore degraded soil
Suitability scoring reads the soil it is scoring: depth, texture, pH and organic matter. A crop that would mine a fragile field ranks lower there, and rotation and soil-cover practice is written into the season plan rather than left as general advice nobody applies.
Partnerships for the Goals
Target 17.17 — effective public, public-private and civil society partnerships
Divisi is funded by the organisations that run programmes on it — agribusinesses, NGOs, extension services and development finance — so the farmer never pays. That is the partnership model doing real work: it is what keeps the app free.
Quality Education
Target 4.4 — relevant skills for decent work
Every task in Divisi explains why it matters, not only what to do — so a farmer finishes a season knowing more agronomy than they started it with. The crop, pest and disease guides are open on the web for anyone to read, whether or not they ever install anything.
Read the guides →In the Farmer's Own Words
Advice that arrives in borrowed vocabulary gets ignored. Our glossary explains African farming terms and converts the measures farmers actually use — buckets, paces, a matchbox of top dressing — into the units agronomy is written in.
The farming glossary →Our Principles
Built on Principles That Matter
Free, Forever.
Every feature is free for every farmer — no card, no tier, no trial clock. Good farming advice shouldn't depend on income, so we fund Divisi through the organisations that run programmes on it rather than by charging the farmer at the bottom of the chain.
Offline First
We design every feature to work without internet. A farmer in a remote valley shouldn't lose access to advice the moment their data runs out.
Built for Your Farm, Not Everyone Else's
National averages don't help a farmer in Mashonaland East. Every piece of advice we give is set to the farmer's actual location, real climate, and real season.
Farmers Are Not the Product
There's a version of this business that harvests field boundaries and yields from millions of farmers and sells them on. It would be lucrative, and it would make every claim on this page worthless. So we don't sell farm data — your records are yours.
How We Measure
What We Count, and What We Won't Claim
What we can count
Things Divisi observes directly, and can therefore state:
- Farms and fields with a location-specific crop recommendation
- Seasons planned, and tasks completed against those plans
- Extreme-weather warnings delivered before the event arrived
- Diary and ledger records kept — a farm's own evidence base
- Questions asked and answered in the Farmer Hive
- Countries, languages and crops covered
What we won't claim
We do not publish yield or income uplift figures. Attributing a harvest to an app requires a controlled study against a comparison group of similar farms — and we haven't run one. Plenty of agritech numbers in circulation skip that step; we would rather be the ones that don't.
When we do publish an outcome figure, it will come with the method, the sample and the partner who verified it. Until then, the honest claim is the one above: farmers are making better-informed decisions, and we can show you exactly how many.
Running a programme that needs measured, farm-level evidence? That is exactly what Divisi Enterprise produces — field records captured by members as they farm, with their consent, rather than recall surveys collected months later.
Divisi Enterprise
Run an Outgrower Programme? Get Ground Truth.
Divisi Enterprise is built for organisations doing contract farming: your members farm with Divisi, and your programme gains real visibility — the field records, tasks and yields captured on the ground, not second-hand reports. When an extreme situation hits a member's crop, your agronomists can step in remotely with supplementary support, exactly where it's needed.
The result: fewer manual field visits, better-targeted ones, and healthier harvests across the programme. We also welcome partnerships with NGOs, input suppliers, off-takers, extension services and development finance institutions who share our mission.
Explore Divisi EnterpriseStop Guessing. Farm Smarter.
Join thousands of smallholder farmers across 20+ countries making better decisions every day — free, forever.
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