Digital farmer services (DFS) can significantly improve farmers' yields, livelihoods, and climate resilience, but these benefits only materialize if farmers adopt and use digital tools in meaningful ways.
This was the challenge we tackled through the behavior change work under the DIG-it-AL project. We partnered with five DFS providers to understand why farmers weren’t using their offerings as intended despite their proven benefits. Only by identifying these barriers could we design and test solutions to improve adoption.
This blog highlights three key behavioral barriers to adoption that emerged repeatedly in our research with nearly all five DFS providers: capacity, value, and trust.
Behavioral barriers are internal factors (e.g., beliefs and preferences) that shape decision-making and behavior. These challenges can often be addressed through small, cost-effective design tweaks or strategic “nudges.” Conversely, structural barriers include external, systemic, or environmental factors that exist outside the farmer’s control (e.g., lack of internet or mobile network access). Overcoming these barriers often requires large-scale policy, infrastructure, or institutional changes. We identified structural barriers in our research to provide context, but since they are much harder to shift, they were not our primary focus.
We provide examples from research with our partners in India and Nigeria to illustrate how barriers related to capacity, value, and trust can manifest in different settings. In India, our partner sought to encourage women extension agents to collect and share farmer data via WhatsApp, while in Nigeria, our partner aimed to increase smallholder farmers' use of advisory information.
It goes without saying that capacity is critical to digital service adoption. If smallholder farmers do not know how to use smartphones, for example, then they will be unable to use digital services like apps that are offered on smartphones.
Simply training farmers in digital skills often isn’t enough, as the underlying causes of low digital literacy are often more complex. In India, women extension agents bought subsidized smartphones from our DFS partner but had to share them with their entire family, limiting their access. Without regular use, even the best digital training would have little impact. In this case, a more effective intervention would focus on encouraging families to prioritize the women’s access to the phone, ensuring they have opportunities to improve their skills.
As stated above, DFS can have many positive benefits for smallholder farmers. However, if these benefits are not known to the farmer, they will have little incentive to adopt the DFS.
Having digitized records would help the extension agents in India offer their farmers more customized support and advice. However, this benefit wasn’t clear to the extension agents. As a result, they continued to collect data on farmers using their traditional pen-and-paper methods, especially since they already had organizational systems for paper-based data collection, allowing them to go back and easily reference information if needed. From their perspective, collecting data on paper was essential, while sending the same data digitally felt like unnecessary extra work.
Successfully engaging with DFS requires farmers to trust the provider. They need to know that the information coming from digital advisory is accurate and reliable or that someone will come to pick up their produce if they use digital tools to facilitate the sale.
Sometimes, mistrust isn't about the digital service itself but rather the person delivering it. In Nigeria, our partner used digital tools to train lead farmers, who supported extension agents in training their communities. However, we found that many farmers didn't fully trust their lead farmers. When our partner independently selected lead farmers, others perceived them as receiving special privileges. Conversely, when the community elected them, some farmers saw them as peers, leading to a lack of respect and reluctance to follow their advice.
When studying issues related to digital service adoption among smallholder farmers, we can almost guarantee that at least one, if not all, of these barriers will be present. The key challenge is understanding how they play out in each context to ensure that any solution directly addresses the root causes.
To support digital service providers, we developed this toolkit to help identify the underlying barriers to adoption, including those related to capacity, value, and trust. We also provide step-by-step instructions for co-designing and testing solutions. By applying these methods, providers can gain a deeper, contextually relevant understanding of barriers to adoption and develop solutions that make digital services more accessible and impactful for smallholder farmers, helping them realize the benefits these services offer.
© 2024 All Rights Reserved
