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).

Caption

Author: By Bobbi Gray and Lakshmi Iyer, Grameen Foundation

Publish date: 26 September 2025

Is there a world where digital agriculture advisory services - or any technology - can scale without community-based agents?

The collective answer by D4Ag group participants was a resounding ‘no’.

A 2024 publication from CGIAR noted that digital agriculture advisory services (DAS) applications have not become a mainstream practice anywhere nor are they expected to achieve 100 percent penetration any time soon.

Why is that?

We Need Community-Based Agents

Grameen Foundation knows from decades of on-ground experiences that DAS cannot scale without community-based agents.

Grameen is a member of the Agripath consortium - an action-research project funded by both the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and the German Agency for International Corporation which seeks to bring sustainable agriculture to scale by identifying, evaluating, and promoting promising pathways for smartphone-based DAS.

Perhaps for some who are not new to this space, this is obvious, but for some donors, investors, public sector and private-sector DAS providers, community-based agents are often overlooked when designing DAS technologies or business models.

It is difficult to scale smartphone DAS applications without people.

We Need People for Every Technology

It also turns out, it’s also difficult to scale Artificial Intelligence (AI) based chatbots and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology often for the same reasons, even though they appear to be “break-through” technologies.

Why?

Sometimes it’s the technology and other times, it’s a lack of trust in the technology being shared. As IFPRI notes, AI lacks emotional intelligence that is necessary to build the trust in tools that can benefit smallholder farmers.

In other instances there are social and gender norms that restrict various groups from using the technology.

For example, in India, our research found men did not want their wives to access the internet, afraid they might cheat - leading to a significantly reduced mobile phone usage amongst rural women.

But it’s not just a lesson being learned under Agripath – it’s a lesson Grameen has learned trying to scale video-based education materials and mobile money amongst rural and even urban populations.

Although greater connectivity through infrastructure changes is becoming more of a reality in the geographies we work in, rural locations are still lacking. It is in these locations we have often found ourselves going back to traditional means of sharing information, either through dialogue-based education or offline modalities.

We Must Relearn that People Are Central

In a recent e-conversation held with the Digitalisation of Agriculture (D4Ag) dgroup hosted by the Digital Agri Hub, we explored this question among peers, seeking validation that our experience reflected that of others.

Turns out, this is a lesson being constantly learned over and over.

The excitement of the technology—and even the way it is marketed to the industry—gives you the impression that you just get it into the hands of the farmers, and you’ve overcome the challenges of dwindling agricultural extension services.

The reality, however, is that some sort of community-based agent is instrumental in introducing and scaling such digital services. This includes government, NGO, or private sector extension agent, community or village knowledge worker, rural promoter, community-based advisors or trainer, digital agriculture service agent, production leader, or agrodealer.

Four Key Community-based Agent Considerations

It's critical to acknowledge their role for a few key reasons:

CBAs are an important cost-center

It is not always clear what business models cover the costs of the agents outside of short-term incentives. Those DAS providers who simply see themselves as data platforms seek pre-existing community-based agent networks.

Who is sustaining the costs of those community-based agents with a fair wage?

This is a challenge that has also haunted the community health worker. Seen as the frontline of the public health system, they have been constantly underpaid and often exploited.

Governments, especially those with digitalization policies and programs, have to continue to invest in people, if they want their digitalization policies and programs to thrive.

Donors also need to be supportive of accepting these as costs of doing business when they support projects seeking to scale technology among rural populations.

Technology needs to be designed for use by the community-based agent

This means when human-centered design is occurring, their use of the technology should be included in the design.

Many DAS providers design with the smallholder farmer in mind, but in reality, community-based agents are often the only ones that can initially use the technology so long as the community-based agent is equipped with the smartphone and DAS technology him or herself. DAS providers often find themselves retrofitting their technology so that the community-based agent is the one using it.

The community-based agent then can help overcome some of the challenges listed above by directly sharing information from the DAS application with smallholders or supporting farmers to trust and use the DAS themselves.

Agripath research also found that the community-based agents themselves also are challenged to use DAS services because of the smartphones they use or their ability to navigate the DAS application or technology.

Community-based agents support the interpretation of the information

Even for AI-based applications, community-based agents are the frontline for deciding whether the information being provided is relevant and accurate for their context.

DAS is also often designed with a prominently spoken language (English, French, Spanish, etc.), leaving out local languages that smallholder farmers most often speak. Community-based agents help with this basic language interpretation as well.

CBAs Need Gender Balance Too

Women and other marginalized individuals may not be able to access DAS without a female community-based agent, especially if the local context discourages women engaging with men who are not family.

But this also means, it’s difficult to recruit female community-based agents for the same gender norms that impact women’s access to DAS: lack of mobile phones, limited mobility, limited digital literacy to name a few.

If DAS providers want to ensure their technology reaches women alongside men, then they will either have to seek community-based agent networks who have already prioritized the inclusion of female community-based agents or they will have to find ways to support or incentivize the strategies that will be needed to recruit, train, and retain female community-based agents. This again, is an important cost center to consider when budgeting for scaling DAS.

Do Not Repeat These Errors with AI

We are still encouraged by the promise of DAS and the introduction of AI; however, we can’t repeat the same errors with AI that we’ve made in trying to scale non-AI technologies.

In the short run, we may find efficiencies in reaching farmers with advisory through DAS but we don’t yet know at what point you can really move from serving 1 to 10 farmers to 1 to 1000 farmers.

At what point do community-based agents become less critical?

If trust and confidence is built for DAS tools, how long does it take until farmers are able to use tools on their own? And what types of DAS tools are most promising for active farmer engagement?

We still have to work towards a world where farmers can access information independently and in a timely manner and this is why we all believe DAS is important.

However, until the barriers to access and use of DAS are reduced, we have to continue to support and fund community-based agent networks and ensure they are assumed to be a critical part of any introduction and scaling effort of DAS.

If you spend time on GSMA’s Mobile Connectivity Index, setting aside high-income countries, you’ll see most countries have barriers to mobile phone purchases (too expensive), data purchases (too expensive), gender gaps (men own more phones than women), poor networks, few localized applications (especially in local languages), poor online security, etc.

Disclaimer: Original story published on ICTworks (https://www.ictworks.org/you-cannot-scale-digital-technology-services-without-people/)