Platform for African – European Partnership in Agricultural Research for Development

Monday, March 27, 2023

Scaling impactful digital agricultural services

30 March 2023.
 Scaling impactful digital agricultural services in the last mile

This webinar presented key results and lessons from the GSMA Innovation Fund for the Digitisation of Agricultural Value Chains, an initiative that supported six grantee organisations in designing, developing, testing and scaling commercially viable digital solutions that address smallholder farmer challenges.

The recording will be posted here


The webinar provided insights into service adoption and usage, showcasing the significant impact these services have had on farmer incomes, productivity, financial inclusion, and climate resilience. It featured a panel discussion with grantee representatives from AgroMall (Nigeria), Dialog (Sri Lanka) Koltiva (Indonesia) and Vodacom (Tanzania) to explore valuable lessons learned in service design, user journeys, and partnerships.
  • Emily Gamble Monitoring and Evaluation Manager GSMA
  • Lisa Chassin Insights Manager GSMA
  • Matthew Strickland Market Engagement Director GSMA
  • Nuwan Jayasinghe Specialist - Digital Impact, Group Sustainability Dialog Axiata PLC (Sri Lanka)
  • Galih Gede Project Manager Koltiva (Indonesia)

  • Fejiro Gbagi Project Manager AgroMall (see pages 124-126 in the report)

    Agromall is a Nigeria agritech company that works with smallholder farmers and agribusinesses to help farmers access a variety of affordable financial services that enable them to improve their practices and expand production. Agromall is building on its existing solution ADAP (AgroMall Digital Agriculture Platform), by providing increased transaction transparency to agribusinesses, farmer cooperatives and government intervention programmes. This will enable farmers’ financial inclusion through access to digital financial services (input credits and other segmented financial services including crop insurance) and digital procurement (direct market access for produce). The project focuses on rice, maize and soya bean value chains.



  • Yvone Bayona Head of Sales, IoT and Digital Platforms Vodacom (Tanzania) (pages 137-139)

    For the past 17years, Yvone has managed to grow and embrace changes in different roles within Vodacom, rising from customer service agent to various managerial roles. Yvone has developed a passion in emerging technologies and Agritech (how technology can change and transform agriculture sector). She is currently spending more time with farmers in the villages so as to understand their pain point and come up with customized solutions which will change farmer’s lives. 

Shared resource:



This report draws on business intelligence data from 1.4 million digitally profiled farmers and over 500 thousand service users. It shares lessons about business models, service design and user uptake and feedback, and assesses the perceived impact of digital agriculture services on farmer incomes and climate resilience.

Extracts:

Timely interventions in the agriculture sector are important. Because farmers’ activities are seasonal, timely procurement, input delivery and advisory messages are vital. Digital agriculture services may also rely on non-digital logistics, such as input supply and delivery, to meet requests for in-kind input loans and ensure farmers have their inputs in time for planting season. (page 108)

Farmers do not fully understand the value proposition of digital payments. Digital  payments can help farmers qualify for loans but, according to Vodacom, most farmers do not understand the connection. They have started raising awareness of the importance of digital payments in building a financial track record that could support loan applications.  (page 108)

Launching digital agriculture services is a challenge, whether for agribusiness and cooperative clients or B2C services for farmers. It is a seasonal sector in which an ageing farmer base has low digital literacy skills and low rates of smartphone ownership. (...) Human-centric design and iterating services leads to higher satisfaction rates among farmers and attracts more users, which are 
key to being impactful for farmers. (p. 110)

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