WORK
The New Harvest
Juma's 2011 study of agricultural innovation in Africa — the application of his framework to the continent whose transitions first forced him to develop it, and the operational specification for investment in absorptive capacity.
The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa (Oxford University Press, 2011, 2nd ed. 2015) developed the case that agricultural transformation in Africa required not merely new technologies but integrated investment in the institutional ecosystem — educational systems, financial infrastructure, regulatory frameworks, and cultural resources — that would enable smallholder farmers to translate capability into livelihood. The book became the intellectual foundation for the African Union's Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme and shaped agricultural policy across the continent. Its analytical framework — absorptive capacity, institutional co-evolution, inclusive governance — generalizes beyond agriculture to any technology transition in any economic context, including the AI transition.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book emerged from Juma's conviction that the dominant frameworks for African agricultural development — technology transfer from developed economies, structural adjustment programs designed by external institutions, charitable food aid — had produced decades of disappointing results because they misidentified the binding constraint. The constraint was not