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Paper short abstract

Digital agriculture shifts power over data, services and rural futures. Designed well, it builds inclusion, jobs and agency for youth/women; designed poorly, it deepens divides. Participatory models can rebalance trust and promote digital democracy.

Paper long abstract

Digital agriculture is often framed as a neutral accelerator of productivity, yet it actively reorders power over data, services, and rural futures. This paper draws on different strands of work at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI); starting with efforts in Africa to institutionalize agriculture data hubs, as climate-services digital public infrastructure (DPI) where it maps how governance, data ownership, and revenue incentives, decide who is included, who pays, and whose knowledge counts locally. The DPI is positioned not only to improve climate-informed advisories, but also to expand agency through new roles and livelihoods for youth and women (village-based micro-entrepreneurs, distribution and support networks, and allied businesses), while explicitly confronting exclusion risks tied to network, phone access/use and digital literacy. Pathways, that derive from a citizen-science crowdsourcing model, show that pastoralists and livestock keepers in remote and fragile contexts, can become contributors and interpreters of near-real-time market, rangeland, and food-security signals; strengthening trust and feedback while generating measurable improvements in information access, practice change, and livestock income. However, evidence from India’s livestock digitization landscape cautions that, without deliberate inclusion, digitization can deepen inequality, perpetuate the digital divide through high costs, limited localization, technological complexity, fragmented applications, weak gender-disaggregated monitoring, and uneven trust. We therefore conclude by asking what governance and participation principles are required for digital democracy so that digital agriculture expands agency, decent work, and resilience rather than extractive growth in the current uncertain world.