Accepted Paper
Paper short abstract
The transformative capacity of African agricultural platforms and data is simultaneously seen as an emancipator and an oppressor. Findings from Ghana and an analysis of apps show a more nuanced reality. Limited scale and market volatility confine any impact of platformization today.
Paper long abstract
Data generating technologies have increasingly been present in African. Agricultural platforms bundle advisory, finance, market, and due diligence services and gradually penetrate every aspect of the agricultural sector. Platforms can profoundly affect agricultural (pre-)production, value addition, and marketing, but demand vast, real-time, accurate data from many farmers and farms for this.
Our paper presents a mixed-method investigation of qualitative data from interviews with diverse stakeholder in Ghana’s agricultural and start-up sectors, and structural analysis of (web)apps targeting African agriculture. We assess the essential and non-essential data that is actively and passively collected. The start-up ecosystem and its influence on developers’ decisions about platform design and data practices are also analysed. As such, the paper interrogates two distinct discourses and their practical embedding: The techno-positivistic one (promising transformative positive impacts) and the data-critical one (warning about loss of agency, privacy, and data capitalism).
Research findings indicate that data generation is a central and defining feature of an agricultural platform’s business model. Yet, the agricultural sector’s complexity and increasing levels of uncertainty and volatility, combined with (smallholder) farmers’ incapacity or unwillingness to participate in the platform economy, provide a challenging and high-risk business environment for start-ups and investors. The current scale of operation of most start-ups and platforms limits actual capacity for big data collection and (transboundary) data flows and therefore either positive or negative impact. Arguably, neither the positivist nor the critical discourse thus matches with first-mile reality today, demanding policymakers, developers, and investors to revise their expectations and strategies.
Tension? Competing Visions for Digital Agriculture and Rural Development: Smallholder Agency vs profitable business models at scale.