Who We Are
AgriPath is a Consortium of global, multi-disciplinary partners who share a strong interest in sustainable agriculture and agree that:
Reaching women and youth is crucial towards achieving it.
Household structures and decision-making are a hurdle to do so.
Digital tools could play a major role.
Delivery channels and social norms are key to unleash their potential.
The COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted the potential of digital services and brought about new opportunities in terms of scaling DAS.
Timeline
The AgriPath project kicked off in 2021 with initial implementing partners onboarding, focus group discussions, and vignette studies taking place shortly after in 2022.
By 2025, AgriPath has:
Worked with farmers and DAS implementers in five countries
Conducted several randomized control trials
Published and disseminating the Toolkit
Conducted lab-in-the-field and online experiments
Developed digital engagement hubs to scale the farmbetter app
Created gender studies on social norms
Consortium Partners
The Centre for Development and Environment (CDE)
The Centre for Development and Environment (CDE) is Switzerland’s centre of excellence for sustainable development. CDE hosts the World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technologies (WOCAT) database, a primary source of sustainable agriculture technologies accessed within AgriPath. CDE plays a crucial role in coordinating project activities and their implementation. Additionally, it co-leads Work Package 1, which examines the levers of DAS Adoption, and Work Package 4, focusing on Capacity Development and Scaling.
Grameen Foundation USA
GFUSA will lead capacity development and upscaling by disseminating the AgriPath learnings in order to develop capacities of stakeholders to apply them. The findings will be translated into an easy-to-use toolkit for providers, users, and donors to improve return on investment of deploying DAS for smallholders. Dissemination of the toolkit will be conducted at national, regional and global level through events, workshops and webinars to enable peer-to-peer learning and knowledge exchange.
Grameen Foundation India
GFI supports financial and development institutions to better address and reach the needs of low-income populations. Its Client Insights for Impact (CII) team evaluates internal projects, but also supports other pro-poor organisations in collecting and analysing easy-to-understand client-level data to improve their impact. GFI brings its local partner network to Agripath and is primarily responsible for coordinating research and AgriPath activities in Asia.
farmbetter
farmbetter will translate research findings into a revised, co-produced app design. Building on a prototype and human-centred design approach, it addresses the following questions: How can the interface be used and adapted for effective adoption of sustainable agriculture by farmers directly or via agents? What agricultural practices are missing from farmers’ and extension agents’ perspectives? How to reach farmers and agents, and embed their feedback to improve the app and matching algorithm? WP2 drives impact beyond the project period via the social enterprise model of farmbetter.
Kathmandu University
KU is an academic institution dedicated to academic excellence in various classical and professional disciplines. A PhD student and post-doctoral positions at KU will support Agripath's exploratory and scaling research.
icipe
While research done by the University of Bern will assess the levers of DAS uptake, icipe’s work within AgriPath focuses on the effects of DAS on behaviour change towards the uptake of sustainable agricultural practices. It addresses questions such as: In which context and under which model are DAS most effective at leading to long-term change? What inputs are required to design such DAS? To answer these questions, icipe will implement a Randomized Control Study (RCT) in India and Uganda, and conduct Surveys in Tanzania, Burkina Faso and Nepal.
University of Lausanne (Unil)
UNIL – HEC is leading Work Package 1 of AgriPath. The team will conduct research on 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.
Local Implementing Partners
Kilmo Trust (Tanzania and Uganda)
Solidarité et Entraide Mutuelle au Sahel SEMUS (Burkina Faso)
iDE Nepal
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.
Contact us
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