How are farmers using digital services in low- and middle-income countries?

Jaron Porciello, Sam Coggins, Gabriella Otunba-Payne, Edward Mabaya

Cultivating innovation

Whether we call it the fourth agricultural revolution, smart farming, precision agriculture or Agriculture 4.0, digital technologies are transforming farming.

Mobile phones and other data-enabled services have increased access to information, knowledge, financial services, markets, and farm tools for millions of farmers worldwide. Small-scale producers use an array of digital tools, ranging from data-based crop management to mobile phone-based banking. These tools have successfully reached even the remotest populations and have attained some incredible achievements.

Far from being passive consumers, the evidence shows that farmers are active agents who use, adapt and create information and services. In fact, nearly half of the studies that we assessed describe farmers transforming an existing service and making it more applicable for their own needs.

Read the full reports

A Systematic Scoping Review

Key messages and findings

But they often face challenges in the use of such technologies. Basic infrastructure gaps, such as access to electricity or mobile phone networks are a major barrier.

Our review of the literature uncovered many ways in which innovative farmers and service providers are overcoming these challenges. Continuing to involve farmers in the development of new services will help generate some quick wins for culturally sensitive, innovative services, and leveraging the power of social networks – be they virtual or real-life — can help lead to more sustained use.

And although some of the most active farmers—women—seem to be disproportionately excluded from the benefits of digital technology and services (a disparity that is often compounded by overlapping social barriers such as education and poverty), there are hopeful signs that the research community is belatedly recognizing the importance of understanding the gender gap, and incorporating it into current research priorities.

After reviewing more than 7,000 studies using a systematic scoping review method–a decision-making framework to determine whether individual articles present evidence of impact– we can confidently say that most farmers are eager to enter the digital age and harness new technology to improve their livelihoods.

A roadmap of the evaluation process

The full report provides definitions, examples and assessments of the types of digital services and outcomes, 74 facilitators and barriers that impact service use and uptake, and an exploration of social factors to understand who is empowered, and who is being excluded.

Research is on the rise. More than 50% of the included studies were published in the past three years, with the full range covering 2000-2020.

The majority of studies are focused on providing farmers with digital advisory & extension services. Read descriptions of our outcomes and interventions.

Outcomes
Interventions

Outcomes

OUTCOME CATEGORY & DESCRIPTION

WHAT WERE THE SPECIFIC OUTCOMES REPORTED IN THE
LITERATURE?

Income: change in income

Productivity: change in on-farm crop, labor or livestock productivity

Yield: a change in harvested crops

Practice Change: changes in a user’s practice related to other agricultural outcomes such as yield, productivity, and/or income

Market efficiency: change in decision-making based on available, relevant market information

Resilience: mitigate, adapt and recover from shocks and stressors

Cost effectiveness: cost benefit analysis for the DEAS supplier (including quantified develop ment outcomes, not just monetary outcomes)

Climate resilience: prevention or minimizing the impacts of climate change

Community cohesion: reduced conflict, stronger social networks and/or increased collaboration within a community

Environmental sustainability: improved sustainability of natural resource management, such as water, forest or soil management

Nutrition: improved household nutrition, including increased food supply and security

INCLUSIVITY, EMPOWERMENT AND AGENCY

The process of improving the terms of participation in society, particularly for people who are disadvantaged, through enhancing opportunities, access to resources, voice and respect for rights. This is measured through changes in knowledge practice and behavioral change resulting from the support and inclusive design of all people, but in particular traditionally marginalized groups such as women and people with disabilities, as well as through increased decision-making.

Increased knowledge: a demonstrated increase of knowledge about agriculture-related content

Gender: increase in influence, decision-making or agency

Social inclusion: reduce or remove the obstacles that limit the agency, decision-making capacity

Social learning: DEAS non-users indirectly increasing their knowledge and/or changing their practices through DEAS by observing and/or interacting with DEAS users.

Interventions

INTERVENTION CATEGORY

DESCRIPTION

EXAMPLES OF SPECIFIC INTERVENTIONS

Agricultural advisory and extension services can fulfill a variety of functions, such as promoting environmentally sustainable production, and providing training on new techniques.

Extension
General Agronomy
Human Nutrition
Market, Price & Subsidy
Livestock Information
Pest Management
Seeds & Fertilizer
Soil & Land
Water & Irrigation
Weather & Climate

Digital financial services rely on digital technologies for their delivery and use by consumers and have the potential to transform the provision of financial services, spurring the development of new (or modify existing) business models, applications, processes, and products.

Credit
Financial Training
Insurance
Payments
Saving
Subsiby

A range of technologies embedded within on-farm products to deliver optimisation of the production and improved sustainability of crop and livestock.

Farm management software
Precision Agriculture

Digital market linkages provide opportunities to standardise and streamline formal and informal business practices. These services link farmers and intermediaries, businesses to other businesses along the value chain.

Agricultural Inputs
Output Market Links
Service Provider Links
Supply Chain Management

Despite small-scale producers being the most studied population (88% of all studies), only 30% of studies captured demographics of the study population, including age, education or sex. Explore these socio-demographic factors here

Phone calls supported by text messages are the most commonly-analyzed modalities to deliver digitally-enabled agricultural services, followed by a phone call, text message and video combination.

Use facilitator	User-driven interface		Externally-driven interface
Use facilitator	Phone call with real person	Chat app with real people	Video	Custom app	Interactive voice response	Voice message	Text message service
Device reqs.	Basic phone	Smartphone	Smartphone	Smartphone	Basic phone	Basic phone	Basic phone
Aware of DFS	Social network	Social network	Findable on YouTube	Hard to find	Hard to find	Hard to find	Hard to find
Mobile network reqs.	Low	Mod	High	Mod	Low	Low	Low
Sustained service	Low external inputs	Low external inputs	Low external inputs	External inputs req.	External inputs req.	External inputs req.	External inputs req.
Dig. literacy reqs.	Low	Mod	Low	High	Mod	Low	Low
Literacy reqs.	Low	High	Low	Mod	Low	Low	High
Human support	Yes	Yes	No	Maybe	No	No	No
Timeliness	On-demand	On-demand	On-demand	On-demand	Maybe	Maybe	Maybe
Localized	Yes	Yes	Maybe	Customized	Maybe	Maybe	Maybe
Two-way	Discussion	Discussion	No	Interactive	Interactive	No	No
Trust	Higher	Higher	Maybe	Maybe	Maybe	Maybe	Maybe
Priority/constraint sensitive	Yes	Yes	Maybe	Customized	Maybe	Maybe	Maybe
Ease of sharing	Easy	Easy	Easy	Mod	Hard	Hard	Mod
Culturally sensitive	Yes	Yes	Maybe	Maybe	Maybe	Maybe	Maybe
Embarrassment avoided	High risk	High risk	Low risk	Low risk	Low risk	Low risk	Low risk
Maintain relationships	Yes	Yes	Maybe	Maybe	Maybe	Maybe	Maybe

More than 50% of DEASs feature some kind of human support, such as a phone call with a live person or in-person support.

Just seven countries represent more than 75% of the published evidence in our dataset: India, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda, Indonesia, Nigeria and Tanzania. India has the most studies represented, due in part to India’s early interest in using digital technologies to support its already active advisory and extension services and the general geographies where academic and development researchers work.

Explore the full
dataset here

Minding the gaps

The more than 570 million family-run farms around the world play a vital role in contributing to 25% of their countries’ GDPs (Lowder et al., 2019). For many, the path out of poverty could come from unlocking the potential of the agricultural sector. This is possible through a process of structural transformation, and such transformation happens along a continuum— from the household and farm, through the commercial sector, up to the top levels of government. (Christiaensen et al., 2011).

Identifying how and where innovations are across these sectors is essential if we are to fully understand the ecosystem in which digitally-enabled agricultural services are used and the impact they have on the lives of farmers.

Unfortunately, this is difficult to determine when there are significant gaps in empirical evidence. This report sought to capture, classify, and annotate—to the fullest degree possible—the research on digital interventions in agriculture, using peer-reviewed studies and other carefully selected sources that describe impact of a service on our target population, in order to help funding organizations determine priorities for further programming and research based on gaps in the evidence.

Overall, we found that there is not enough quality, empirical data to draw conclusions about actual use and outcomes from digitally-enabled agricultural services.

See more
details here

An evidence gap map represents positive, nil and mentioned outcomes according to different service types presented in our dataset.
See the full report for more information.

Facilitating use

Determining a service’s effectiveness is often measured by outcomes, such as whether a farmer changes a specific practice or experiences an increase in income.

But whether any outcome occurs (positive, negative or nil) also depends on a series of use facilitators and barriers, such as the price of a service or consistent mobile network access.

More than 70% of studies observed factors influencing use of DEAS.

The factors can be explored on the Explore the Full Dataset section.