Paper short abstract:

This talk offers empirical insights into experimental practices of an East African tech-firm for digitalisation in agriculture. Developing a technology while promoting entrepreneurship by setting up an e-extension system in a Tanzanian village raises questions about trust, data and profits.

Paper long abstract:

Given the widespread lack of alternatives in post-colonial and post-development debates, digitalisation raises hopes for a future path to development. In contrast to a history of unfulfilled promises by the state or NGO projects, the testing of digital technologies by the private sector is seen as relentlessly honest and hard business, leading to sustainable development. Instead of mere transfer, knowledge and technologies are now to be developed directly at the sites of their application and in collaboration with local communities. In this presentation, I will illustrate how the development of a profitable technology and the promotion of smallholder entrepreneurship will be linked through the establishment of an e-extension system in the Tanzanian village of Mandera. Through my ethnographic insights into the work of the East African technology company M-Shamba, as well as the use of the I-Plus information platform for knowledge sharing among Tanzanian farmers, it becomes clear that digitalisation in agricultural development does not necessarily escape its technological and epistemic fixation. Cooperation between private and non-governmental actors, the production and use of data, and individualised and regional knowledge exchange are developing in contradictory ways. Questions arise about honest intentions, trust and sustainable business models around digital technologies. This contribution suggests that the experimental use of digital technologies can only reinvent agricultural development to a limited extent.