Nationality: Nigeria
Smart Israel is reimagining how food is grown in the world's most fragile, arid, and displacement-affected regions. As Founder and CEO of Smartel (Farm-In-A-Box), he leads an agri-tech venture building solar-powered hydroponic systems that let growers and entire communities produce fresh food year-round, without soil, and with a fraction of the water and inputs conventional farming demands. His mission is simple: make affordable, nutritious food accessible to the communities that need it most. To get there, Smartel combines IoT, renewable energy, AI, and community-centered ownership into a single integrated platform. High-fidelity sensors, from sky to soil, capture real-time field data, which the system pairs with automated control and AI-driven insight to bring precision agriculture to the realities of African farming. The company is now developing one of Africa's largest agricultural AI models, designed to make predictive, data-driven farming possible at scale. Smart's work has earned wide recognition. He is a recipient of the 2025 United Nations SDG Action Award for Creativity, the UN-Habitat Scroll of Honour Award, and The Diana Award, and serves as a Ban Ki-moon Youth Agri-Champion. He is also a SIGMA Fellow and a Top 5 Global Climate Innovator, and holds a degree in Software Engineering with a specialization in Machine Learning.