Accelerating Digital Transformation in Agriculture

Author: Sander Janssen

Publish Date: 11 October 2021

Digital technologies have strong potential to support the transformation of agriculture, building a resilient, sustainable and inclusive agrifood system [1]. As key enablers, digital innovations can play a catalytic role – especially in the wake of COVID-19 – by improving the capacity of small-scale producers (SSPs) to adapt to external shocks and increasing productivity and profitability. With more than 33 million smallholder farmers and pastoralists [2] already registered on such platforms, sub-Saharan Africa alone has seen a rapid increase in the adoption of digital solutions, recording an annual growth of 44 per cent over the three-year period ending in 2018. Despite a rapid expansion of the digitalisation for agriculture (D4Ag) sector across low-and-middle income countries, the reach and sustainable use of D4Ag solutions remains fairly low, especially among SSPs. Only 13 per cent of smallholders in sub-Saharan Africa are registered for any digital service and far fewer are actively using such services [3]. Inadequate access to the Internet and digital services, coupled with issues of affordability, disability and a growing digital divide, are among factors that have widened the disconnect. One of the main barriers holding back investment in D4Ag solutions and their impact at scale is lack of cost-effective ways of comparing and contrasting solutions, and making informed decisions on which ones will really work.

Promoting alliances and investments

Despite a highly complex and fragmented digital sector, there is significant potential for establishing sustainable partnerships and investments. For this reason, there is a growing need for greater coordination of D4Ag solutions and their overarching ecosystem, but how best to achieve this?

Stewart Collis from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), says that Digital Agri Hub (the Hub) can play an important role in driving D4Ag solutions for small-scale producers: “Evidence suggests bundled digital farmer services positively impact small-scale producers’ livelihoods by improving access to inputs, information on managing crops and livestock, obtaining climate mitigating finance and insurance and accessing markets. Digital Agri Hub will collate the essential data necessary to understand which combinations of services are reaching men and women small-scale producers at scale with impact, and act as a guide for investment and adoption of the most impactful digital agriculture products, solutions and services.”

Josh Woodard from The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) adds: "As the number of digital solutions in the agricultural sector continues to grow, the Digital Agri Hub will allow practitioners to make more informed decisions and bring clarity to a fragmented information landscape. We're excited by the potential for greater impact as a result of a more cohesive digital agriculture space."

Convinced of the scope for digital technologies in the agriculture sector, FCDO, BMGF and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) are co-funding the Hub to monitor and track the development of digital for agriculture solutions, and their impact in helping to achieve a climate-resilient, sustainable and inclusive food system. Responding to the direct needs of the diverse stakeholder groups that play an active role in D4Ag will be an important focus for the Hub. To this end, it has conducted a needs assessment, with the aim of identifying, unpacking and addressing the major needs for each of the different actors on the pathway towards the sustainable growth of the sector.

The emerging issues

Across the nine identified stakeholder groups, made up of donors, (impact) investors, D4Ag solution providers, agri-food value chain actors, agritech companies, innovation repositories, policy makers and direct implementers (farmers’ organizations and non-governmental organisations), a broad range of issues has emerged. Tomaso Ceccarelli, the lead coordinator on this Ecosystem coordination activity from the Digital Agri Hub team, observes that: “Stakeholders have different perspectives and goals. But there is one trait that unites most of them, and this is the need for a structured overview on initiatives and reliable insights on the impact of D4Ag.”

Gigi Gatti from Grameen Foundation USA – one of the Digital Agri Hub partners – says that: “It is essential to work with existing D4Ag networks and Communities of Practice to understand how to best connect them to the Hub.”

Responding to these diverse needs is a key success parameter for the Hub, integrating such crucial and different perspectives in its programme of work. Simona Benvenuti from the Netherlands Advisory Board on Impact Investing (NAB) – a Digital Agri Hub partner – experiences that "to accelerate the mobilization of private-sector capital into D4Ag it is critical to provide impact-based data on existing D4Ag solutions and insights to mitigate investment risk, thus facilitating collaboration amongst the different types of capital providers and knowledge exchange globally across the value chain".

Daniele Tricarico, from GSMA, also a Digital Agri Hub partner, has closely assessed the development of the D4Ag sector and worked with a number of different solution providers in collaboration with mobile operators. From his perspective, "it is exciting to see a growing number of D4AG services coming to market, but this fast-paced sector also experiences a high level of fragmentation and many short-lived initiatives. It is therefore crucial to quickly identify emerging best practices and highlight the operational and business models that can support truly sustainable, scalable solutions".

Inclusion for all stands out as a critical prerequisite for the sustainable development of D4Ag. In support, Eunice Likoko, from Wageningen University and Research (WUR), adds that: “For women and marginalised groups, improved access to D4Ag solutions will be stimulated by understanding and addressing the barriers they face in accessing digital solutions. Intervention strategies need to go beyond minimal participation of excluded groups, to adopt more empowering approaches that address underlying barriers to promote sustainable and realistic adoption of digital solutions for these groups’’.

A hub for inclusive agricultural transformation

To ensure the strong and sustainable growth of the D4Ag sector, a better tracking mechanism will be central to the success of Digital Agri Hub, while supporting the everyday decision-making process of D4Ag actors across the agrifood system. Whether the decision is to partner with another D4Ag solution provider, to invest in a D4Ag solution, to create awareness and stimulate the development of the sector in a particular country, or to invest in digital developments for societal impact, access to insights, data and knowledge is crucial. It is Digital Agri Hub’s firm intention to truly act as a hub, bringing partners together, creating capacity and connecting actors to one another, helping them to share their insights and best practices towards inclusive agricultural transformation.

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[1] World Bank, 2019. Future of Food: Harnessing Digital Technologies to Improve Food System Outcomes (available here).
[2] 13% of all sub-Saharan African smallholders and pastoralists and up to 45% of smallholder households, depending on assumptions used to calculate penetration.
[3] D4Ag solutions refer to the digitally enabled business models and technologies to address farmers and food system actors’ constraints (e.g. around market access, inputs, financing and climate).

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Author: Wageningen University & Research

Publish Date: 4 October 2022

Digital innovations in the agriculture sector continue to play a critical “enabling” role in transforming the livelihoods of 570 million small-scale producers (SSPs) in low- and middle- income countries (LIMCs). These innovations are improving the information position of SSPs concerning production, market access, financial inclusion and nutrition. They contribute to inclusive growth and jobs for SSPs and value chain players and support climate-resilient food systems. Globally, the rapid growth of the digitalisation for agriculture (D4Ag) sector has led to growing interest among development institutions, (impact) investors and governments in strengthening ecosystem support. At the same time, the sector remains fragmented, with many key players, and regional discrepancies in socio-cultural perspectives (e.g. engagement of women, youth and marginalised groups). Together with the fragmentation and lack of harmonisation and data governance of very heterogenous data repositories with often limited focus on the agriculture sector, this leads to a lack of a global overview of the global D4Ag ecosystem. To bridge this gap, the Digital Agri Hub pioneered the development of a D4Ag dashboard which now hosts 726 active digital innovations deployed in LMICs with global coverage. This is catapulted by self-reported data and collaborative initiatives with institutions such as Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA), Grow Asia, SkyQuest, AgriTerra, MercyCorps, IICA, Enabel and CCARDESA.

Our data journey

The Digital Agi Hub dashboard was publicly launched end of 2021. It built on the strong heritage of CTA’s the digitalisation of African agriculture report initially based on a database of 320 solutions in Africa. In its first year, the collection of digital solution data was made possible through collaborations with several stakeholders who had already made efforts to collect D4Ag data at the regional or country level. Besides, some leeway was provided for D4Ag innovators to submit their data or update existing solutions. As a result, the Hub has now evolved to offering a global database which provides harmonized insights on D4Ag innovations deployed in LMICs. The dashboard currently hosts a global dataset of 726 digital solutions, which is actively maintained, curated and further extended.

Along this road, we have encountered our fair share of challenges to effectively maintain and improve high-quality data and insights, and to embed it into a well-connected data ecosystem.

The D4Ag sector is evolving at unprecedented speeds. Many new solutions appear, and at the same time, unfortunately, also existing organisations and solutions fail to sustain their business. Consequently, we have seen significant changes over short periods, both in our data baseline, and in the external databases we merged. The initial CTA database of 320 solutions, for example, was outdated by an astonishing 27.20 per cent once integrated with our dashboard in 2021. Moreover, available data was often not sufficiently structured, with a lack of clear distinction between projects, solutions and organizations, and with outreach and usage data missing or incomplete in 80 percent of the cases. Hence, quality control and assurance of new data and further improvement and curation of the evolving data baseline have been crucial to maintaining and extending our dashboard.

While developing our database and merging data from different sources we immediately ran into the lack of clearly defined vocabularies and semantics around D4Ag, which made it hard to harmonise data and derive reliable insights. To anticipate on this, and to facilitate future data collection and data exchange, the Hub has compiled a set of concept definitions and taxonomies for D4Ag, using and harmonising knowledge from existing resources where available. We have used these guidelines to structure our own D4Ag data. They are also published on Digital Agri Hub for further uptake and reuse.

A consequence of the current fragmentation of the global D4Ag sector and associated data, is that also a lot of the knowledge is still only shared in regional and local networks. Being well connected with such networks is crucial to get a better view of the evolving ecosystem and, above all, to create the awareness and trust required for stakeholders to share their data. There we have encountered a substantial gap in inter-regional networking opportunities to create valuable synergies among stakeholders and facilitate the mobilisation of data to generate insights. Lack of awareness and trust on these levels still makes it hard to get complete coverage of initiatives, and particularly to tempt stakeholders to share often competitive data, e.g on outreach to SSPs and other user groups, financial aspects and impact.

Some key insights from our dashboard

The Hub’s dashboard provides a wealth of information on individual digital solutions and their deployment in different countries. Using data analytics and infographics, many valuable statistics are provided on the global data ecosystem, notwithstanding the dynamics of the domain and the gaps around competitive data.

Types of use cases supported

Around two-third of the digital solutions support farm management and advisory
Market linkage (33%) and supply chain management (29%) are also well represented
Most digital solutions (54%) implement more than one use case, which might be an indicator for the movement towards bundling of services

Outreach to digital solutions

67% of the registered users are small-scale producers
52% of the registered users are youth (between the ages of 15 and 35 years)
32% of the registered users are women

Here it should be noted that these figures are based on a relatively small subset of solutions that have provided data on registered users and the distribution over one or more of these user groups.

Global coverage

Most deployments of digital solutions on our dashboard are currently located in Africa, which is partly because the initial CTA baseline dataset was focused on Africa only. Moreover, there still seems to be an emphasis on Africa based on donor and investor focus
Most deployments are currently available for India (145), Kenya (135) and Tanzania (89)
For Latin America and the Caribbean, a limited amount of deployments is available, possibly partly due to a lack of data sources and a thus higher dependency on getting data out of regional and local networks

Applied Technologies

There is a large variety of technologies that support the currently available digital solutions, with no “clear winner”
The most applied technology in digital solutions is data analytics & business intelligence (21%), followed by Artificial Intelligence and cloud-based services (both at 19%)

Communication channels

Mobile applications are clearly the most used channel to provide digital services to end users (45%)
Other popular channels that are used by digital solutions in agriculture are SMS (21%) and Social Media (20%)

Call to action

Our dashboard aims to provide up-to-date data on existing digital agriculture innovations while setting a strategic foundation to steer investments and foster collaboration, co-development and learning for D4Ag value chain players globally. Being featured in our dynamic dashboard will build visibility on your solution to more donors, investors and solution implementation partners. If you are an active D4Ag solution provider deploying services in LMICs and want to be part of and benefit from our data journey, send us an e-mail and we will get in touch!

On short term, Digital Agri Hub will launch a data entry facility for digital service providers. This will be announced on our home page.