There are 500 million small-scale farmers worldwide, producing 70% of the world’s food, yet many face chronic hunger and lack essential information to improve harvests, income, and climate resilience. With declining public extension services, digital agricultural advisory services (DAS) offer a promising solution to equip farmers with sustainable practices. However, DAS currently reaches only a small fraction of smallholder farmers, particularly excluding women and youth who face unequal access to these tools. 

‍The Challenge: "Limited use of smartphone-based DAS applications among smallholder farmers, especially among women and girls."

AgriPath research aims to identify, evaluate, and promote promising pathways for DAS that empower female and male smallholders to make informed decisions and sustainably increase their agricultural productivity, income, and climate resilience through the uptake of sustainable farming practices.AgriPath studies and experiments provide country specific knowledge of farmers’ behaviors, and the involvement of women in DAS. Learnings from the AgriPath project have been applied to develop an evidence-based toolkit to accelerate uptake of research findings by DAS implementing organizations. Learn more about Agripath and its research.

A resource designed to equip DAS stakeholders—particularly those seeking to scale smartphone-based DAS applications-- with practical tools to strengthen extension agent networks and deliver scalable, sustainable digital advisory services for smallholder farmers, especially women. The toolkit is grounded in research from the AgriPath project, which evaluated different models of delivering DAS to smallholder farmers.  

The toolkit is relevant to organizations seeking to scale the use of smartphone-based DAS applications among smallholder farmers, especially among women farmers, with a special focus on leveraging community-based and/or extension agent networks as intermediaries. In this toolkit, they are referred to as DASA – Digital Advisory Service Agents. Read more about the special focus on DASA.

Users of this toolkit will be at different stages of designing and developing DAS solutions. Whether you are starting your DAS development process, or are scaling an existing DAS solution, the toolkit will provide insights and evidence to enhance adoption, scale and sustainability of your DAS platform by leveraging agent networks.
For DAS implementers who are starting their design and development process, we recommend that you first read “Why Digital Advisory Services Agents?” and then complete all other sections of the toolkit in order.
For DAS implementers who are looking for specific tools to guide the improvement of existing DAS solutions, you can jump to the sections that are most relevant to your specific need.

However, you will find great value in learning from the AgriPath experience and research findings, and we recommend that you look at all the tools provided.