Casey Harrison is the Director of Impact and Learning at Nuru International with 14 years of experience working at the convergence of agricultural production and sustainability. During his seven years at Nuru, he has supported locally-led NGOs to achieve their goals of helping smallholder farmers sustainably and inclusively transform local food systems. Before working at Nuru, he spent four years as a member of the Food and Agricultural Markets teams at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF-US), supporting multinational companies to realize their environmental and social governance goals within global supply chains. His work at Nuru and WWF-US allowed him to collaborate on projects that leverage digital technology for the benefit of smallholder farmers, cooperative agribusinesses, and supply chains in Tanzania, Zambia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and South Africa. Casey acts as the Agribusiness Market Ecosystem Alliance (AMEA) network AgTech Working Group Lead, supporting efforts to mainstream appropriate and disruptive digital technology into farmer organization development with over 30 like-minded development institutions.
The proliferation of digital technology and ICT tools available to Kenyan agribusinesses has reached unprecedented levels. Kenya is not alone in this phenomenon, as similar trends can be seen across the developing world. Unfortunately, more is not always better when measured as technology usage, adoption, or benefits for rural agribusinesses. Agri-MSMEs, rural cooperatives, and other types of farmer organizations play a crucial role as customers for technology services and an efficient conduit delivering technological benefits to smallholder farmers. However, rapidly expanding and, at times, paralysis-inducing digital technology markets are not yet meeting the demands of these professionalizing farmer organization agribusinesses.
The Agribusiness Market Ecosystem Alliance (AMEA) is well placed to discuss this phenomenon as a network of organizations that support over 1,300 farmer organizations representing over 2,600,000 farmers around the world.
New Delhi, India
Texcoco, Mexico
Washington, D.C., United States
