Agriculture and climate data APIs for African developers

The Wycord registry tracks 14 verified resources matching agriculture: weather stations, soil maps, crop statistics, food price feeds, MCP servers, AI advisory agents, and speech datasets. They span Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda, Senegal, Cameroon, and pan-African initiatives. This post maps each one to the use case it actually fits.

Weather and Climate Data

TAHMO is the most practical starting point for weather data in sub-Saharan Africa. The network runs 800+ automatic weather stations across 19 African countries, recording rainfall, temperature, humidity, wind speed, and radiation at sub-daily intervals. API access is free for research and education. Coverage includes Kenya, Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Senegal, Ethiopia, Côte d'Ivoire, and more.

NiMet Weather is Nigeria's official meteorological agency API. If you are building something Nigeria-specific, this is the authoritative source and it is free.

FAO WaPOR provides near-real-time satellite-derived water productivity data at 30m, 100m, and 300m resolution, updated every 10 days across sub-Saharan and North Africa. It covers evapotranspiration and biomass production, making it useful for irrigation scheduling and yield estimation. Free access, no registration required for bulk downloads.

mazingira-mcp exposes Kenyan environmental infrastructure as an MCP server, including climate data, conservation boundaries, and environmental permit lookups. It is designed for AI assistants that support the MCP protocol.

Soil and Land Data

iSDAsoil is the first continent-scale predictive soil property map for Africa at 30m resolution. It covers the major soil properties an agrifintech credit model or precision agriculture app needs: pH, nitrogen, carbon, texture, and more. Hosted on Zenodo and free to download.

rwasis-mcp is an MCP server for Rwanda's national soil information system. It provides location and parcel lookups, crop listings, and soil data by GPS location through a Python interface. Rwanda's soil information service is accessible from any MCP-compatible AI assistant once this server is running.

For satellite-derived land productivity across the continent, FAO WaPOR's NDVI proxies and evapotranspiration layers fill the gaps where ground surveys are sparse.

Crop Statistics and Food Prices

HarvestStat Africa contains harmonized subnational crop statistics for 33 Sub-Saharan African countries from 1980 to 2022. This is the most comprehensive historical yield dataset for the continent. Hosted on GitHub, free and open. Useful for training yield forecasting models or understanding seasonal and regional baselines.

FEWS NET Nigeria Staple Food Prices provides weekly price data for Nigeria's main food commodities. Nigeria Real-Time Monthly Food Prices (World Bank) is the complementary monthly dataset with broader commodity coverage. Both are free.

Nigeria General Household Survey (GHS-Panel) Wave 5 is a nationally representative panel of roughly 5,000 households covering economic activity and agricultural production for 2023-2024, published by the World Bank Microdata Library.

MCP Servers for Crop Advisory

Two MCP servers stand out for developers building AI-powered crop advisory tools:

kilimo-mcp (Kenya) covers six tools: crop calendar, fertilizer guidance, pest and disease alerts, KALRO-certified crop variety recommendations, market timing, and input cost calculations. The retrieval is grounded in Kenyan agronomic data rather than generic LLM outputs, which matters for farmer-facing accuracy.

mcp-agriculture by zavora-ai (Kenya) is a Rust-based MCP server with 35 tools: farm field management, 7-day weather forecasts, growing degree day calculations, satellite NDVI and anomaly detection, IoT soil moisture integration, commodity market pricing, and yield forecasting. It ships with a realistic Kenyan test dataset spanning five counties. Use this if you want a broad precision agriculture platform rather than a focused advisory tool.

Both are open source and connect to any AI assistant that supports MCP.

Farmer-Facing AI and Language Tools

Darli AI by Farmerline (Ghana) is the most production-ready farmer advisory tool in the registry. Over 1 million farmers use it across 60 countries via WhatsApp, voice, and web. It delivers crop disease diagnosis from photos, treatment advice, weather alerts, and market prices in 27 African languages, covering cassava, cocoa, maize, coffee, and rice. Farmerline named it to TIME's Best Inventions 2024. The platform API is available for integration into third-party apps.

Kallaama is a 125-hour transcribed speech dataset in Wolof, Pulaar, and Sereer from Senegal, focused specifically on agriculture conversations. Use it to train or fine-tune ASR models for Senegalese farming contexts where standard speech datasets perform poorly.

Sunflower-14B is a 14B parameter multilingual LLM from Uganda that supports 31 Ugandan languages plus English. Agriculture is one of its stated target domains. Apache 2.0 licensed and available on HuggingFace.

Field Data Collection

For collecting farm-level data in low-connectivity or offline environments:

ODK Collect is the standard open-source Android app for offline survey data collection using XLSForm-based forms. It is deployed in agricultural programs and research projects across the continent.

Ona Data (Kenya) is a Django-based aggregation and sharing platform that provides the server-side backend for ODK-based pipelines. It exposes an API for downstream analysis and visualization tools.

Tractor and Equipment Operations

Hello Tractor (Nigeria) provides developer APIs across three domains: financial services integration, tractor telemetry ingestion, and marketplace operations for the tractor-sharing model. It is the primary infrastructure for smallholder access to mechanization in Nigeria.

What to Use When

You are building...	Start with
Crop advisory chatbot or agent	kilimo-mcp or mcp-agriculture
Precision agriculture dashboard	FAO WaPOR + mcp-agriculture (NDVI, yield, satellite)
AgriFintech credit scoring for farmers	HarvestStat Africa + iSDAsoil + food price feeds
Nigeria-specific weather data	NiMet Weather
Pan-African weather station data	TAHMO
WhatsApp or voice bot for farmers	Darli AI integration
Rwanda soil and parcel lookups	rwasis-mcp
Senegal ASR model training	Kallaama dataset
Multilingual LLM for Ugandan agriculture	Sunflower-14B
Offline farm survey data collection	ODK Collect + Ona Data
Tractor marketplace or telemetry	Hello Tractor API

Browse the full verified list at https://wycord.com/datasets and https://wycord.com/ai, or filter by country at https://wycord.com/countries.