Abstract
The landscape of digital innovations in Africa is characterized by significant “digital divide”: less than 40 percent of smallholder households have access to the internet (Mehrabi et al., 2021). Marginalized farmers and households have even less access to the internet and mobile phones, this differential access to digital innovations and associated complementary infrastructures may generate further inequality.
Taking Egypt as a case study, smallholder farmers can easily get excluded from the agricultural digital revolution, as the existing rural farming communities in less developed or remote regions in Egypt usually lack the infrastructure required and internet connectivity to navigate these tools (OBG, 2022; AGBI, 2023). The high cost of smartphones and internet services may be one reason why urban households are more digital than rural households.
Consistent with literature and evidence from experimental learning (e.g., Carter et al, 2014; Fischer et al., 2019), short run subsidies that allow users experience a technology may help potential users revise their expectations, and eventually adjust their beliefs on the relative costs and benefits of these technologies. In this study, we utilize the Egyptian context and aim to investigate how access to a shared smartphone, which allows smallholder farmers to operate and use agricultural digital tools free of charge over the internet for a short period of time would: (i) impact farmers’ use and adoption of digital agricultural tools, (ii) affect farmer’s willingness-to-pay (WTP), following a 6-month experimental learning period, to keep and invest in these smartphone devices for future adoption.