Can access to data really transform agriculture for smallholders?

To strengthen resilience and productivity of these smallholder farmers, they need an enabling environment that supports their access to critical resources such as finance, markets, inputs, information and technical solutions. This issue of ICT Update uncovers the power of organised smallholder farmers. Through a series of case studies, we explore how farmers’ organisations can make use of farmer data to enable access to resources, thereby strengthening the resilience, voice, or livelihoods of smallholder farmers.

The Pan African Farmers Organisation (PAFO) has been working with CTA and AgriCord in the Data4Ag project to identify how data can be used by their organisations to improve the livelihoods of their members. Working with 10 farmers’ organisations across Africa, they have been investigating how managing farmer profile data can change agribusinesses. Some of these test cases are seeing the benefits: highest crop returns for 15 years; new countries as markets for produce; improved logistics; policy influence and access to credit. However, the story varies by crop and location and there are clear challenges with connectivity, limited economic benefits and complexity in data management.

AgriCord, a global alliance of agri-agencies, finds that digitalisation for agriculture breaks paradigms. “We see that through digitalisation, there is much more access and there are many more possibilities, also for women to participate in the economy”, says Stefaan Bonte, Strategic Partnership Facilitator at AgriCord. Through mobile applications, many women are able to access innovations in an autonomous way, challenging the paradigm that innovation is less accessible to women. PAFO has similar findings; through applications and e-extension, digitalisation empowers women with access to mobile phones to market their produce and access finance, where they were previously dependent on their male peers. This allows women to become decision-makers, and move from subsistence producers to economic actors, hence giving them more power over their own lives.

For digitalisation in agriculture to truly benefit smallholder farmers, interventions are needed in multiple areas. In this issue we examine how the foundation of farmers profile data plays a role in four areas of agricultural operation: Production, Markets, Finance and Organisation.

Organisation

Digitalisation is not only a technical issue; in many cases it’s a socio-political one. On the one hand, data becomes available to farmers which enables them to make informed-decisions, on the other hand, data becomes available about farmers, making visible the challenges farmers face and enabling targeted solutions. Accurate knowledge on the members of an association or agribusiness ensures more efficient operations in the organisation and better representation of the groups’ interests, as you can read in the stories of SACAU and EAFF.

Markets

NUCAFE, the Ugandan National Union of coffee farmers’ association, tells their story of how profiling and mapping has helped expand their market and secure higher revenues for their coffee. New markets open up when the farmer-owned businesses or associations can proof product origin, through opportunities for certification and transparency.

Finance

Inputs in agriculture and investment in sustainability depend on finance, which for smallholders has been limited if not non-existent. In the projects presented, farm profiles are now used to access credit and engage banks. For Igara Tea Growers Factory, farmer profiles have supported the set-up of a SACCO, in which digital farm profiles act as collateral and reduce the financial risk involved in lending to their members. You can also read how EARS uses aggregated data to provide smallholders with affordable drought insurance.

Production

Farmer data generated on-farm or off-farm can inform services to farmers that allow targeted production information, be it alerts on risks (weather and pests) or extension information such as crop husbandry. In Kenya, CLI-MARK shows us how weather data increases resilience of pastoralist communities and AgriCord discusses preliminary findings on soil scanner services for smallholder farmers.

A recent workshop organised by PAFO, AgriCord and CTA with partners from Central, West, East, Southern and North Africa, on capacity development for African farmers’ organisations through improved policies, technologies and capabilities, showed that data is crucial to enable access to finance for smallholder farmers. Access to finance enhances farmer resilience as it enables them, for example, to adopt more sustainable coping strategies. As such, access to finance can help stabilise agribusinesses and catalyse further investments, as farmers become more eligible for loans. Collection and verification of data that can unlock access to finance, however, requires investment. Key is to work out the cost of registration versus the benefit of returns. As Dr. Mizzi, Head of Unit Rural Development, Food Security, Nutrition, Europeaid, European Commission, put it: “In agriculture the first investors are farmers themselves”. We thus need to let digitalisation work for farmers, with a special focus on inclusion for women and youth in agribusiness development. Drawing from the lessons learned during the workshop, PAFO, CTA and AgriCord will continue to work on three key areas: policy dialogue, digitalisation and data-drive services, and markets and agribusiness development.