Rise of digital!
When I started working on digital agriculture a decade ago in 2010, in East Africa, we were trying to prove a very basic hypothesis that mobile technology could support farming communities. There was an excitement around a simple idea that mobile phones can help deliver information to farmers. We didn't know how it would work in practice, the assumptions were many, and frankly - many of those were wrong! Development community's understanding of smallholders' literacy and digital literacy levels, ability to pay, a range of household and farm pain points, was very basic and in many ways based on assumptions and we were all about to hit a massive learning curve.
The use cases we explored a decade ago were around: providing agricultural knowledge, weather predictions and information on market prices. While rich media services delivered via apps are expanding, basic 2G channels (text and voice) remain vital to delivering advisory to smallholder farmers. This is to a large extent explained by limited access and usage of smartphones and mobile internet in rural areas, low digital literacy as well as some cultural barriers. For example, in most LMIC countries, women are 20% less likely to use mobile internet services (see full picture of gender gap in 2020). Now, in 2020, digital advisory services are becoming much more intelligent, providing highly localised, granular information to support farmers in decision making.