Is there a world where digital agriculture advisory services—or any technology—can scale without community-based agents? The collective answer by D4Ag group participants was a resounding ‘NO’.
Why is that?
We Need Community-Based Agents
A 2024 publication from CGIAR noted that digital agriculture advisory services (DAS) applications have not become a mainstream practice anywhere nor are they expected to achieve 100 percent penetration any time soon. Grameen Foundation knows from decades of on-ground experiences that DAS cannot scale without community-based agents.
Grameen is a member of the Agripath consortium – an action-research project funded by both the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and the German Agency for International Corporation which seeks to bring sustainable agriculture to scale by identifying, evaluating, and promoting promising pathways for smartphone-based DAS.
Perhaps for some who are not new to this space, this is obvious, but for some donors, investors, public sector and private-sector DAS providers, Community-based agents are often overlooked when designing DAS technologies or business models.
It is difficult to scale smartphone DAS applications without people.
We Need People for Every Technology
It also turns out, it’s also difficult to scale AI chatbots and IVR technology often for the same reasons, even though they appear to be “break-through” technologies.
Why?
Sometimes it’s the technology and other times, it’s a lack of trust in the technology being shared. As IFPRI notes, AI lacks emotional intelligence that is necessary to build the trust in tools that can benefit smallholder farmers.
In other instances there are social and gender norms that restrict various groups from using the technology. For example, in India, our research found men did not want their wives to access the internet, afraid they might cheat – leading to a significantly reduced mobile phone usage amongst rural women.
But it’s not just a lesson being learned under Agripath – it’s a lesson Grameen has learned trying to scale video-based education materials and mobile money amongst rural and even urban populations.
Although greater connectivity through infrastructure changes is becoming more of a reality in the geographies we work in, rural locations are still lacking. It is in these locations we have often found ourselves going back to traditional means of sharing information, either through dialogue-based education or offline modalities.
We Must Relearn that People Are Central
In a recent e-conversation held with the Digitalisation of Agriculture (D4Ag) dgroup hosted by the Digital AgriHub, we explored this question among peers, seeking validation that our experience reflected that of others.
Turns out, this is a lesson being constantly learned over and over.
The excitement of the technology—and even the way it is marketed to the industry—gives you the impression that you just get it into the hands of the farmers, and you’ve overcome the challenges of dwindling agricultural extension services.
The reality, however, is that some sort of community-based agent is instrumental in introducing and scaling such digital services. This includes government, NGO, or private sector extension agent, community or village knowledge worker, rural promoter, community-based advisors or trainer, digital agriculture service agent, production leader, or agrodealer.
4 Key Community-Based Agent Considerations
It’s critical to acknowledge their role for a few key reasons:
1. CBAs are an important cost-center.
It is not always clear what business models cover the costs of the agents outside of short-term incentives. Those DAS providers who simply see themselves as data platforms seek pre-existing community-based agent networks. Who is sustaining the costs of those community-based agents with a fair wage?
This is a challenge that has also haunted the community health worker. Seen as the frontline of the public health system, they have been constantly underpaid and often exploited.
Governments, especially those with digitalization policies and programs, have to continue to invest in people, if they want their digitalization policies and programs to thrive. Donors also need to be supportive of accepting these as costs of doing business when they support projects seeking to scale technology among rural populations.
2. Technology needs to be designed for use by the CBA.
This means when human-centered design is occurring, their use of the technology should be included in the design.
Many DAS providers design with the smallholder farmer in mind, but in reality, community-based agents are often the only ones that can initially use the technology so long as the community-based agent is equipped with the smartphone and DAS technology him or herself. DAS providers often find themselves retrofitting their technology so that the community-based agent is the one using it.
The community-based agent then can help overcome some of the challenges listed above by directly sharing information from the DAS application with smallholders or supporting farmers to trust and use the DAS themselves.
Agripath research also found that the community-based agents themselves also are challenged to use DAS services because of the smartphones they use or their ability to navigate the DAS application or technology.
3. CBAs support the interpretation of the information.
Even for AI-based applications, community-based agents are the frontline for deciding whether the information being provided is relevant and accurate for their context.
DAS is also often designed with a prominently spoken language (English, French, Spanish, etc.), leaving out local languages that smallholder farmers most often speak. community-based agents help with this basic language interpretation as well.
4. CBAs Need Gender Balance Too
Women and other marginalized individuals may not be able to access DAS without a female community-based agent, especially if the local context discourages women engaging with men who are not family.
But this also means, it’s difficult to recruit female community-based agents for the same gender norms that impact women’s access to DAS: lack of mobile phones, limited mobility, limited digital literacy to name a few.
If DAS providers want to ensure their technology reaches women alongside men, then they will either have to seek community-based agent networks who have already prioritized the inclusion of female community-based agents or they will have to find ways to support or incentivize the strategies that will be needed to recruit, train, and retain female community-based agents. This again, is an important cost center to consider when budgeting for scaling DAS.
Do Not Repeat These Errors with AI
We are still encouraged by the promise of DAS and the introduction of AI; however, we can’t repeat the same errors with AI that we’ve made in trying to scale non-AI technologies.
In the short run, we may find efficiencies in reaching farmers with advisory through DAS but we don’t yet know at what point you can really move from serving 1 to 10 farmers to 1 to 1000 farmers. At what point do community-based agents become less critical?
If trust and confidence is built for DAS tools, how long does it take until farmers are able to use tools on their own? And what types of DAS tools are most promising for active farmer engagement?
We still have to work towards a world where farmers can access information independently and in a timely manner and this is why we all believe DAS is important. However, until the barriers to access and use of DAS are reduced, we have to continue to support and fund community-based agent networks and ensure they are assumed to be a critical part of any introduction and scaling effort of DAS.
By Bobbi Gray and Lakshmi Iyer, Grameen Foundation
