Agripath

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Project Introduction

The Challenge: Lack of efficient and gender-responsive digital agricultural advisory services for smallholder farmers

Two-thirds of the food consumed globally is produced by 500 million smallholders. Yet, these small farms struggle with low productivity and income, vulnerability to climate change, poor access to information on practices that could help enhance their production, securing their livelihoods and protecting their resource base. Gender equality, in particular, could lead to substantial gains in farm outputs through equal access to, and control over productive resources. Meanwhile, public rural advisory services are dwindling, leaving millions of smallholders without adequate support to face these challenges. In this context, digital agriculture advisory services hold great promise for improving smallholder farmers’ capacity for applying sustainable agriculture practices. Digital advisory services (DAS) can offer farmers access to crucial agricultural knowledge and support them in increasing their resilience, but DAS has only reached a small fraction of smallholder farmers in the global south, and women, especially, lack equal access to these solutions.

The AgriPath Project

AgriPath embeds the results and insights from action research into implementation and aims to scale sustainable agriculture by identifying, evaluating, and promoting digitally supported agricultural advisory services. AgriPath is designed around one digital application – the farmbetter app – which is co-designed with, and tailored to, its users in the target countries. The algorithm of the farmbetter app matches farmers’ needs with sustainable land management solutions.Our goal is to empower female and male smallholders to make informed decisions and sustainably increase their agricultural productivity, income, and climate resilience through the uptake of sustainable farming practices.

Our Approach

Examining levers of DAS Adoption

A group of scientists from the University of Lausanne (HEC) aims to employ behavioral science to comprehend the factors that facilitate or hinder the diffusion of DAS (Digital Agricultural Solutions) among smallholders, with a particular focus on youth and women. The team plans to utilize online experiments, lab-in-the-field experiments, and machine learning analyses of focus group discussions. This approach ensures participant privacy while still providing novel causal insights into the underlying challenges of DAS adoption.
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For further inquiries, please contact Professor Sonja Vogt at sonja.vogt@unil.ch.

Adapting the farmbetter advisory app to the local context

The AgriPath research is designed around one digital application, the farmbetter app, which is applied in different countries and part of different models of DAS. The farmbetter app serves as a proxy, which remains constant throughout the research process. In this way, we can manipulate core features and achieve causal insights that can be generalized to other digital solutions. The farmbetter app draws from the largest available data repository on Sustainable Land Management (SLM), the WOCAT Global SLM database to present rich, and actionable content.
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For further inquiries, please contact Sylvia Ng’eno at sylvia@farmbetter.io

DAS Sustainability Pathways

Randomized controlled trial studies, conducted by consortium member ICIPE, will examine three different models for delivering DAS, as well as their potential to drive behavior change towards adoption of sustainable land management practices;
• self-service model (farmers using DAS on their own);
• agent-based model (extension agents using DAS with the farmers);
‍• hybrid model (farmers using DAS on their own, with agent support).
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For further inquiries, please contact Dr. Menale Kassie at mkassie@icipe.org

AgriPath Toolkit for DAS Actors

AgriPath studies and experiments will provide country-specific knowledge of farmers’ behaviors, and the involvement of women in DAS. Grameen Foundation will apply learnings from the AgriPath project to develop a scaling framework and an evidence-based Toolkit to accelerate uptake of research findings by DAS actors. As an example, the AgriPath Toolkit will include cost and content considerations when selecting a DAS delivery channel and a practical guide on how DAS can be made more women-farmer centric. The AgriPath Toolkit for DAS Actors will be disseminated globally to strengthen efforts of DAS providers to design tailored, human-centered solutions and to support actors and neighboring countries in scaling sustainable agriculture with DAS.
For further inquiries, please contact Brigitta Mugo at bmugo@grameenfoundation.org

DAS Toolkit

The objective of the AgriPath DAS toolkit is to accelerate uptake of research findings to guide the current and future practices of technology providers, development organizations and private sector firms.

AgriPath studies and experiments will provide country-specific learnings on farmers' behaviours, and the involvement of women in digital advisory services. Grameen Foundation will apply these earnings to develop an evidence-based Toolkit for DAS Implementing Organizations. The toolkit is an online resource that will incorporate practical worksheets, checklists, reading material, and case studies to guide other DAS implementers on how to design and scale DAS channels.

FUNDED BY

SDC's research program TRANSFORM 2020-2030 aims at accelerating the valorisation of knowledge and technology by promoting research for the direct benefit of concrete needs of development actors. AgriPath aligns with the first objective of the TRANSFORM Programme of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation(SDC), to generate and validate transformative knowledge and technology.

‘AgriPath' commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), is part of the Fund for the Promotion of Innovation in Agriculture (i4Ag) and being carried out by ‘CDE and AgriPath consortium‘ on behalf of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH.