Abstract
Digital innovations could facilitate access to markets and smallholder commercialization through the following ways: (1) reduce communication and information costs; (2) improve farmers’ knowledge and know- how about market options and prices; (3) improve access to input and output markets; (4) enable and build social networks and connections; (5) facilitate the delivery of other services associated with agricultural markets such as credits and finance; (6) improve management of input and output supply chains; (7) increase communication linkages with other stakeholders involved in agricultural marketing. Despite these advantages that digital innovations could offer, their adoption remains low and heterogenous, especially in Africa, where agricultural markets remain underdeveloped (e.g., Abate et al., 2023; Aker and Cariolle, 2023). Despite the proliferation of digital tools targeting smallholder farmers in recent years in Africa, the vast majority of these remained at pilot stages, with limited evidence of successful scaling and limited impacts to transform agricultural markets.
There exists several demand and supply-side factors that may explain the low adoption of digital innovations and associated heterogeneities across smallholder farmers in Africa. From a supply perspective, this low adoption could be due to several factors, including but not limited to insufficient public and private investment in complementary infrastructure, unsustainable business models, and asynchronous pace of change (Abate et al., 2023). The demand side factors may include: lack of digital literacy, lack of context-specific needs assessment, and digital divide and more importantly accessibility and usability as well as user trust and confidence. However, we lack empirically grounded evidence on alternative and cost-effective interventions to improve adoption and scale-up of digital innovations in various settings. In particular, empirical evidence on most effective strategies to improve access and usability of digital agricultural innovations to smallholders with limited level of literacy remains scarce.
Taking Egypt as a case study, the Egyptian market has an array of innovative digital agricultural tools that offer different services to farmers such as sourcing inputs, providing post-harvest and logistical support, to accessing market information and selling crops online. However, the uptake of these technologies has been quite low, as Egyptian farmers lack the awareness of the benefits of digital tools and can easily get excluded from this agricultural digital revolution due to a lack of accessible training (OBG, 2022; AGBI, 2023). This project aims to test alternative interventions to promote the adoption of digital agricultural innovations in Egypt.