TED Talks Daily
How satellites are supporting farmers across Africa | Catherine Nakalembe
24 Oct 2025
More than 8,000 satellites orbit Earth, taking photos every day. Food security specialist and TED Fellow Catherine Nakalembe shows how she uses this imagery to help smallholder farmers across Africa prepare for floods, droughts and crop failures. Learn why real innovation isn’t always about shinier technology — it’s about making the tech truly fit the problem it’s solving.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyou Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Today's talk is part of our new 2025 TED Fellows Films, adapted for podcasts just for our TED Talks Daily listeners. We'll be releasing these special episodes showcasing our amazing fellows on certain Fridays throughout the rest of 2025 and into the new year.
So stay tuned. The TED Fellows program supports a network of global innovators, and we're so excited to share their work with you. Today, we'd like you to meet the satellite food security specialist, Catherine Nakalembe. It might be hard to imagine how satellites orbiting in space can help farmers tending to the soil on Earth.
But for Catherine, who uses satellite technology and machine learning to monitor smallholder farming, this connection is essential. She shares how satellites can play a vital role in helping to feed the world and why, even with her bird's eye view, a grounded, bottom up approach to supporting farmers is just as key.
As she puts it, true innovation isn't about high tech systems, but about making technology fit the problem. After we hear from Catherine, stick around for her conversation with TED Fellows program director Lily James Olds.
If farming was your primary source of income, and if you can't grow anything, there's not much you can do. It's very demoralizing. It's very overwhelming. A lot of the countries where I work, farmers face fires, pests, diseases, droughts and floods. If crops fail, no food is available for a lot of people who depend on what they produce.
It translates into, you know, sometimes an entire generation being undermined. My name is Catherine Nakalembe, and I'm a satellite food security specialist. I use satellite data to map and monitor crops and then work to make sure that information can be used by decision makers and organizations that support farmers. I primarily focus on Africa, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Mali, Senegal.
Last time I checked, there were over 8,000 satellites observing our earth. They take pictures every day. You can use those images to map what crops are growing where. how much it's going to rain, where the system might be coming from, where it might be impacted, and how badly it might be impacted. I can just sit on my computer and tell you anywhere in the world.
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