Digital agriculture and pathways out of poverty: the need for appropriate design, targeting, and scaling
Photo by Munira Morshed Munni
For digital agriculture to deliver on its promise of increasing farmers’ yields and incomes, it is critical to design interventions that consider the target populations’ needs and constraints and to assess whether a digital technology solution is appropriate.
The need to make agriculture more profitable, productive, efficient, sustainable, and attractive to new groups, while making food more nutritious, provides a key opportunity for innovation in the field of digital agriculture. Digitization of the economy, or “cyber-physical” merging of human and machine, is often presented as the fourth industrial revolution.
Digital technologies are changing the way people access information, interact with others, provide services, sell and purchase products, and, ultimately, how they make decisions. The digitization of agricultural value chains is an opportunity to generate wealth, save time, and improve livelihoods throughout the world. The utilization of low and high technology solutions for agriculture has enormous potential to transform the agriculture sector. Currently, at least 96% of the world’s population is within range of a mobile signal.
Digital technologies have the potential to revolutionize agriculture and transform the sector and rural livelihoods. The integration of digital technology in agriculture can potentially lead to the modernization of the sector through better connected, informed farmers who have access to new information and markets while reducing hardships and ultimately improving their livelihoods. Agricultural researchers and implementers are actively developing new tools and solutions in agriculture that leverage digital technologies.
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