Theme Specific Highlights - Digital inclusion
The digital inclusion theme sessions included discussions on multiple issues and pressing challenges faced by women farmers, youth, and smallholder farmers across LMICs, as well as the role of digital solutions in overcoming these challenges. Some key problems and potential solutions discussed under this theme are mentioned below:
1
Lack of digital services focusing on women farmers
2
Need for youth inclusion in workforce through technology
3
Low sustainability of donor funded projects
Challenge: Lack of digital services focusing on women
Women produce approximately 60-70% of the food in most developing countries and are responsible for almost 50% of all global food production. However, interactions with women farmers across regions highlight that the adoption of ICT-enabled solutions amongst them is abysmally low. For instance, women in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia use mobile internet at a rate that is approximately 36% lower than men. This is a cause for concern as this digital divide can work against gender mainstreaming activities by creating a bias in favor of men who are more likely to adopt technologies. Furthermore, if women shared equal access and control over productive assets, farm yields could increase by 20–30% (FAO 2012). The biggest barriers for women to access digital services are cost, digital skills, relevance, and trust. How can we better design and deliver digital services to improve their adaptability for women?
POTENTIAL SOLUTION: Innovative applications along the value chain are needed, especially in rural areas, to help female farmers achieve higher agricultural yields, keep value creation local and build sustainable, climate-resilient food systems. ICTforAg can be made more gender-inclusive by encouraging women entrepreneurs to develop tech-based solutions, involving women in the design stage, using sex-disaggregated data for customer segmentation, including women in community mobilization teams, and adopting other similar approaches. Digital solutions should be context-specific and take into account social/household dynamics; otherwise they may exacerbate the digital divide. Approaches that make ICTforAg technologies more gender-sensitive and enable women entrepreneurs to contribute to the development of more gender-balanced tech solutions are imperative.
A) The Sprout platform, designed by a consortium under the GIZ Digital Agriculture Africa (DAA) project, comprising Mercy Corps, FSPN, CoAmana, and KLARO. Itenables information dissemination targeted at women farmers.
Sprout is a sustainable public good (B2B) platform and marketplace where expert content and service providers and farmer facing organizations meet to share and acquire digitally ready, farmer friendly content and services. The Kenya Agriculture & Livestock Research Organization (KALRO) is the Sprout platform host and a significant contributor to service design and content offerings. The platform is deployed in Kenya, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe and uses easy-to-operate digital formats like SMS, IVR and WhatsApp. The platform provides custom-designed content by solution providers to smallholder and women farmers after understanding their interest areas. For example, Digicow (a Kenyan mobile agri technology developer) uses Sprout to disseminate information on artificial insemination requirements for cattle and for financial management by women dairy farmers. By incorporating a gender-intentional strategy, the platform aims to create an ecosystem in which partnerships are formed and trust is built among women farmers.
B) The Agripath initiative is a consortium of the University Development and Environment (CDE) India, the University of Lausanne, Grameen Foundation USA, Grameen Foundation India, the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology, and farmbetter limited.
Agripath helps in developing digital advisory services (DAS) that foster changes in people's attitudes and social norms related to agriculture. It tests different DAS delivery models to evaluate their efficiency, uses data collected by the applications to assess barriers and factors leading to successful behavior change, and facilitates scaling of key results through the development of a toolkit and an application (farmbetter). Currently, Agripath is benefiting over 50,000 women farmers across Uganda, Burkina Faso, India, Nepal, and Tanzania. Lessons learned from Agripath will be made available in a toolkit for providers of digital advisory services.
Challenge: Need for youth inclusion in workforce through technology
Equitable, effective, and sustainable rural development cannot be achieved without recognizing the role played by rural youth and women in fostering such outcomes. Several studies have shown that climate change heightens gender inequality, and has greater repercussions for women and young people, especially those who work in the agricultural sector. Also, in several geographies, such as China, South Korea, Kenya, and Uganda, there has been an overall increase in the average age of farmers, indicating that the agriculture sector in these areas seeks the participation of youth. In a similar vein, there are 9.4 million unemployed young people in Latin America and the Caribbean, 2.3 million of whom do not study, work, or are in training, and more than 30 million of whom only find employment in informal conditions (International Labor Organization). Participation of women and youngsters in agriculture is lagging behind. How can we bring about inclusion in the agricultural workforce through technology? How can large donor organizations and agri-companies that reach a large number of famers, play a significant role in bringing inclusivity?
POTENTIAL SOLUTION: Inclusivity may be achieved by training young people on digital literacy and technology driven agriculture. Programs designed to incentivize youth participation in agriculture, especially technology-driven agriculture, not only help overcome the challenge of aging farmers, but also help increase adoption of digital solutions at the last mile. Additionally, seeing successful young farmers can encourage more young people to engage in agriculture. Showcasing successful programs will help demonstrate practices that have been successful in engaging youth in agriculture. Large agri-input and agro-processing companies may play a major role in doing this.
A) Solidaridad, along with Nestle, developed the agro learning program, which is a school for entrepreneurship for young Colombian coffee farmers.
This solution offers agri-practice-specific learning topics to educate young people on practices to be carried out in the field. It offers free training resources and tools for agriculture, which promote the development of skills to implement sustainability practices.
Similarly, Bayer, under the Co-Herencia project, along with Solidaridad, organizes mobile farmer schools to train youngsters and women in mobile-based decision-making to take climate-smart decisions. To ensure 100% attendance, these lessons are delivered in their villages using low-tech solutions such as video presentations. Both solutions are context-specific.
B) IFAD is investing in agribusiness hubs and is planning to expand this to 11 African countries.
The objective is to build digital and entrepreneurial skills among rural youth and women, in addition to helping them get access to wage employment. Another focus area is to promote peer-to-peer learning. IFAD has also tied up with partners working on multiple learning models like community-based agents and village-based advisors where youth are involved as change agents to provide community based agribusiness services and even create their own agribusinesses. To improve the inclusion of women, IFAD is creating rural women's saving groups to provide them with know-how and enable them to track finances through digital solutions.
Challenge: Low sustainability of donor funded projects
Donors and development organizations often do not have the background, expertise, and resources to identify high-potential solutions and firms with the same degree of due diligence that investors might have. The sustainability of large donor-funded projects and the lack of ownership by farmers and local communities in donor-funded projects is a challenge. Hence, it is important to understand how donor-funded projects can effectively support digital agriculture service providers, thereby making their business model more sustainable and scalable, without distorting the market?
POTENTIAL SOLUTION: Donor funding may work hand in hand with the commercial funding provided by the market players. Donor funding is required for supporting innovations and developing innovative products, as other players may be unwilling to bear the cost of innovation. Conversely, donor funding should not be focused on areas where commercial viability has already been established and farmers are willing to pay market prices for services or products. Such funding is treated as a customer acquisition cost in markets where the cost of establishing the business model or penetration or acquiring farmers is expensive, especially for early-stage businesses. To assure long-term viability, the projects have to incorporate sustainability lessons into the project design. Also, the project design should focus on building the capacity of the local government to formulate a clear exit strategy.