Introduction
Acknowledgements
This report was prepared under the overall guidance of Paulo Kautoke, Senior Director, Trade, Ocean and Natural Resources, Commonwealth Secretariat.
The project was led by Kirk Haywood, Head, Commonwealth Connectivity Agenda Section, and coordinated by Dr Benjamin Kwasi Addom, Trade Advisor, Commonwealth Connectivity Agenda Section.
The report was drafted by Asigma Advisory led by David Nanambi Wakyiku, Team leader at Asigma Advisory and Technical Lead for the Study; Louisa Akiror, Engagement Manager at Asigma Advisory and Project Manager on the study; Prisca Adong, Advisory Associate at Asigma Advisory; Paul Ntegeka, Business Analyst at Asigma Advisory.
Background to the report
Agriculture ensures food security and employment in most of the Commonwealth member countries. More than half of the population, in 32 of the 56 Commonwealth member countries, reside in rural areas and are engaged in smallholder agriculture.
On the other hand, commercial and advanced mechanised methods dominate agricultural production in the developed part of the Commonwealth. As a result, the transformational impact of agriculture-led growth in the Commonwealth cannot be overemphasised. The diversity of the Commonwealth countries – low-, middle- and high-income countries; large or small population size; landlocked, coastal or island countries; and located in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe, or the Pacific – uniquely positions it for South–South and triangular cooperation. Despite this diversity, the systemic issues relating to agriculture in the Commonwealth countries remain similar.
These include the following:
- Climate variability is especially for the small countries whose export profiles tend to be concentrated in goods and services that are climate sensitive.
- Agricultural productivity is a factor of agriculture-led growth and a ratio of agricultural outputs to inputs that is being impacted negatively by climate variability, reflecting on decreasing agricultural productivity, the basis for trade.
- Market, trade and supply chain is a necessary condition for access to reliable input and output markets – locally and regionally for production and post-harvest management, and a pre-condition for stable income for value chain actors.
- Access to finance and investment, a requirement for market attractiveness, and the emerging role of big data and analytics for alternative credit scoring for financial institutions to manage financial services for agribusinesses.
- Youth employment and entrepreneurship is the foundation for sustaining rural and enterprise development to reduce the rural–urban migration and bridge the gap between the young people seeking work and the available employment opportunities.
- Gender mainstreaming is a key strategy not only for the promotion of equality between men and women, but also for sustainable agricultural and rural development and economic growth as women dominate the lower end of the agricultural value chain.
Despite the above issues, the opportunity is also enormous especially with the power of digitalisation. Digitalisation is seen as a game changer for transforming the agricultural sector.
The Commonwealth
Commonwealth Countries
Commonwealth Small States
Commonwealth Small Island Developing States
Objectives of the report
As countries across the Commonwealth battle with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, there is a looming threat of an economic pandemic in the next few years. Understanding the current state of agriculture in the Commonwealth and the role of digitalisation in responding to the health pandemic is required, for medium-term recovery and long-term resilience strategies for economic and sustainable development to be successful.
The specific objectives of the report are as follows:
- To review the literature on agriculture in the context of the five regional classifications within the Commonwealth – Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe and the Pacific taking into consideration the six systemic agricultural issues outlined in the background to the study.
- To review the literature on the three-pillars-and-base of digitalisation for agriculture in the five regions: the state of digital agricultural innovations, the state of agricultural data infrastructure, the state of business development and investment and the state of the enabling environments for digitalisation
- To conduct gap analyses on the current state of play and changes necessary to harness digitalisation within the agricultural sector.
- To produce policy recommendations to leverage the digitalisation of agriculture in enhancing trade and investment in Commonwealth member countries. In making policy recommendations, the report emphasised the pillars that support resilience and make recommendations on the appropriate responses to existent challenges.
Methodology
Defining Digitalisation of Agriculture (D4Ag)
Digitalisation is the use of digital technologies and services to change the business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities for a business organisation or entity. With specific regard to the agricultural context, digitalisation for agriculture has been defined as the use of digital technologies, innovations, and data to transform the business models and practices across the agricultural value chain and address structural bottlenecks in, productivity, postharvest handling, market access, finance and supply chain management.1 This is aimed at achieving greater income for smallholder farmers, improving food and nutrition security, building climate resilience, and expanding the inclusion of youth and women.
Digitisation, on the other hand, is the process of changing the form of an item from analog to digital form; this is also sometimes known as digital enablement. Digitisation is a pre-condition and a step towards digitalisation of agriculture. Digitisation enables access to up-to-date and quality content data as well as data on users. When digitisation is done correctly, digitalisation becomes more inclusive and sustainable for the benefits of all actors including the smallholders. In other words, digitalisation capitalises on digitisation as data becomes more accessible digitally.
The framework used to assess the state of digital agriculture in the Commonwealth is illustrated in the Digital Agriculture Framework shown here2. The framework depicts an ancient Greek temple with
I) A roof of the temple representing the key systemic issues - climate change, decreasing farm productivity, declining income across the value chain, poor access to finance, failure to equitably include women in the value chain, and the increasing unemployment of the youth - needed to be tackled for agricultural transformation at smallholder farmer level. Once these smallholder farmer impact level issues are fully addressed, it is expected to result in macro-level impacts such as sustainable food and nutrition security and inclusive growth in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
II) Three pillars of the temple consisting of digital agricultural innovations (digital technologies and services for agriculture), agricultural data infrastructure (content data, user data, and the needed infrastructure to manage the data), and business development services (the issues of who pays for digitalisation including the initial financing and subsequent investments) that are needed to ensure the agricultural transformation.
III) The base of the temple representing the enabling environment for digitalisation of agriculture consisting of the agricultural and non-agricultural factors, as well as technological and non-technological factors.
Pillar 2:
Data Infrastructure
Agricultural data infrastructure may be defined as a set of fundamental facilities, the basic structure of the agricultural innovation system that is needed to enable multiple sources of data to be sourced, combined, processed, analysed, governed and made accessible for exchange, use, and re-use.
Pillar 3:
Business Development
Business development services include approaches to initial financing of digital innovations mainly by donors, NGOs and international development partners; subsequent investments by the private sector investors; business models behind the delivery of the digital services; and the willingness of users and other stakeholders to continually pay for the products and services to ensure adoption, scale and sustainability.
Footnotes
1 Tsan, M., Totapally, S., Hailu, M., Addom, B.K. (2019) The Digitalisation of African Agriculture Report 2018–2019. Wageningen: Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation ACP-EU (CTA) and Dalberg Advisers. https://www.cta.int/en/digitalisation-agriculture-africa
2 Addom, B.K. (2021). Digitalisation and Smallholder Agriculture. https://d4ag.com/about/ (Retrieved on 2021 August).
3 Trendov, N. M., Varas, S. and Zeng, M. (2019). Digital technologies in agriculture and rural areas – Status report. Rome. Licence: cc by-nc-sa 3.0 igo https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344041500_DIGITAL_TECHNOLOGIES_IN_AGRICULTURE_AND_RURAL_AREAS_STATUS_REPORT.
4 Malabo Montpellier Panel (2019). Energized: Policy innovation to power the transformation of Africa’s agriculture and food system. https://www.ifpri.org/publication/energized-policy-innovation-power-transformation-africas-agriculture-and-food-system
5 MacAfee, A. and E. Brynjolfsson (2012). Big Data: The Management Revolution. https://hbr.org/2012/10/big-data-the-management-revolution
6 Used key words in each of the country specific searches included “digital agriculture”, “farmer apps”, “digital farming”, “precision farming”, “data-driven farms”, “mobile applications in farming”, “Artificial intelligence in farming”, “farmer IVR service” and “farmer USSD service”.