The Challenge: Lack of efficient and gender-responsive digital agricultural advisory services for smallholder farmers
Two-thirds of the food consumed globally is produced by 500 million smallholders. Yet, these small farms struggle with low productivity and income, vulnerability to climate change, poor access to information on practices that could help enhance their production, securing their livelihoods and protecting their resource base. Gender equality, in particular, could lead to substantial gains in farm outputs through equal access to, and control over productive resources. Meanwhile, public rural advisory services are dwindling, leaving millions of smallholders without adequate support to face these challenges. In this context, digital agriculture advisory services hold great promise for improving smallholder farmers’ capacity for applying sustainable agriculture practices. Digital advisory services (DAS) can offer farmers access to crucial agricultural knowledge and support them in increasing their resilience, but DAS has only reached a small fraction of smallholder farmers in the global south, and women, especially, lack equal access to these solutions.