Socially inclusive digital tools for agriculture: A way forward

KEY MESSAGES ◼ Socially inclusive digital tools are necessary to support diverse smallholder farmers’ access to digital services such as technical advice and access to markets. Improving smallholders’ access to digital resources and providing tool functions and features that enhance social inclusion are both necessary. ◼ Tool features that enable two-way communication, multiple channels of communication, co-creation of practices, and farmers’ demonstration plots support more inclusive technical advisory services. ◼ Performance assessment tools can support smallholder inclusion by assuring that farmers retain ownership of personal and assessment data, that data are stored privately and securely within each user account and that farmer data are not being used for the profit of the tool developer or implementor. ◼ Mobile learning applications, gamification, SMS-alerts, and chatbots within digital tools make learning about agricultural insurance accessible to smallholders and improve adoption. ◼ Digital tools that promote the aggregation of smallholder products or serve as an e-commerce platform allow smallholders to fairly engage in formal markets. ◼ Principles for inclusion can help guide digital tool design and use

Exemplary features of digital tools for agroecology: A global review

KEY MESSAGES ◼ Few digital tools support agroecology comprehensively, but many have agroecological components. ◼ Features that improved two-way farmer communication, targeting of farmer subgroups, farmer-driven content and use of human intermediaries were exemplary features for social inclusion. ◼ Exemplary features for technical advisory tools included context-specific technical options, use of videos, integration with coaching and hotlines for questions, and two-way communication. ◼ Exemplary features for performance assessment included collaborative definition of indicators with farmers, easy to use spreadsheets (for researchers) and easily digestible quick view reporting such as pie charts

Digital tools for climate change adaptation and mitigation

KEY MESSAGES ◼ Digital tool functions for agricultural technical advice and performance assessment related to climate change adaptation and mitigation are limited. ◼ Tools for technical advice provided functions related to climate change adaptation more often than mitigation. Yet most tools (92%) addressed three or fewer climate change adaptation indicators. ◼ Technical advice with access to weather information or early warning systems for hazardous weather was the most common function of the tools analyzed. ◼ Performance assessment tools were predominantly GHG emission calculators. ◼ Features for inclusive communication with tool users (e.g., iconography, video or audio messages) included messaging (31% of tools) and voice and video (28%). ◼ Exemplary tool features for climate change adaptation and mitigation should inform future digital tool development for agriculture and food systems. ◼ Tools that provide coaching functions and support farmer input enable farmers to weigh the trade-offs of their decisions and add context on how to achieve and sustain change. ◼ Achieving scale for climate-informed digital tools does not just mean increasing farmers’ access to tools, but also supporting action recommendations in tools and identifying priority, large-scale impacts in terms of the level of climate risk mitigated and resilience built, or climate change mitigation achieved

Global digital tool review for agroecological transitions

This report summarizes a global review of digital resources relevant to climate change-informed agroecological transitions. The goal of the review was to identify exemplary features of digital tools for socially inclusive and climate-informed agroecological transitions. We cataloged digital resources available globally that provided either technical advisory services or performance assessment, as functions that directly support scaling up new practices. We reviewed the tools’ functions (i.e., the purpose of using a tool) against indicators for exemplary features (i.e., the channels through which a user can engage with the tool). To address social inclusion, we gave special attention to farmers’ co-creation of knowledge for on-the-ground practices

Critiques of digital tools in agriculture: Challenges & opportunities for using digital tools to scale agroecology by smallholders

KEY MESSAGES ◼ Two themes manifest in the challenges outlined, unequal power relations and a disconnect from farmers’ needs and input. ◼ Agricultural digitization should strive to follow ethical principles specific to the sector, agroecology offers an existing framework. ◼ Digital technical assistance that advances the interests of smallholders and is relevant to their farms can facilitate a shift towards agroecology through farmer-to-farmer networks and knowledge exchange. ◼ Recommendations include: ▪ Govern for an inclusive digital ecosystem & economy ▪ Leverage and expand food, data & social justice movements ▪ Code ethics into digital developmen

Principles for digital tool use and co-creation of farming practices: A review and guide

This guide seeks to address some of these concerns with the existing digitization of food systems (Shelton et al., 2022), including: ▪ Digital tools that are irrelevant to farmers’ situations or inaccessible due to a major disconnect among digital developers, public policy, scientific recommendations, extension priorities, and farmers’ needs. ▪ Marginalized groups are often the last to benefit from new technology and are at the greatest risk of exploitation of privacy and data rights. ▪ Many tools do not include more progressive sustainability practices such as low-emission agriculture, climate change adaptation or agroecology, or lack robust scientific evidence behind recommended practices. The purpose of this document is to provide principles for the social inclusion of smallholder farmers in the development and use of digital tools for the benefit of the same farmers. The intent is to improve the benefits of digital tools for diverse and underrepresented groups of farmers, whether defined by gender, age, class, land tenure, language, ethnicity, ability, sexuality, or another relevant category. The guide gives special attention to principles specific to farmer co-creation of farm practices as an element of social inclusion directly relevant to farmers’ livelihoods and as a desirable practice for developing robust technical solutions

Global digital tool review for agroecological transitions

This document contains a review of global digital resources relevant to climate-informed agroecological transitions. The purpose of the review was to catalog relevant digital resources and assess their role in inclusive knowledge development, with special attention to farmers’ co-creation of knowledge for on-the-ground practices. To this end, we identified existing digital tools relevant to technical advisory and performance assessment and reviewed their functions (i.e., the purpose of using a tool) against indicators for exemplary features (i.e., the channels in which a user can engage with the tool) that could support socially inclusive, climate-informed agroecological transitions