By: Kibrom Abay, Fatma Abdelaziz, and Ali Abdelhadi
As part of a series of activities under the USAID-funded project “Evaluating Impact and Building Capacity (EIBC)”, IFPRI organized a virtual technical workshop on “The Potential of Digital Tools to Support Farmers in Egypt: Lessons Learned and Way Forward” on November 9, 2021. The technical workshop aimed to mobilize and bring various actors working on digital technologies meant to support farmers in Egypt. The workshop brought international and national experts to share their experiences. IFPRI researchers presented recent, ongoing work and research plans related to digital agricultural services and technologies.
The first session offered a series of presentations from different panelists, highlighting the potential of digital tools to support smallholders, bringing in international, regional, and domestic experiences. The session also featured IFPRI’s recent review paper on digital technologies and international and regional experiences.
While opening this session, Clemens Breisinger, MENA Regional Program Leader and Senior Research Fellow at IFPRI said: “We know that digital tools can help transform agribusinesses and smallholder farmers and we believe that together we can build apps for that purpose”. Highlighting that while some efforts and initiatives often remain scattered and fragmented, there is a lot of potential for synergies and there is room to better integrate the existing tools into our national agriculture systems.
“This workshop is important because it brings both the theoretical knowledge along with the practical experience on the table. USAID is excited for the launch of IFPRI’s Agriculture App repository” said Ayat El-Dersh, Project Management Specialist at USAID. El-Dersh stressed that it is crucial to address the sector’s main challenge which is the existence of a lot of scattered data, explaining that the repository can be one way to help integrate and compile existing digital tools to support the smallholder agriculture sector in Egypt.
Mohamed El Kersh, Assistant to the Minister, Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation (MALR), Egypt Explained that MALR has an established unit for digital transformation and a program for digital transformation in agriculture, as part of the ministry’s sustainable development strategy.
David Spielman, Senior Research Fellow at IFPRI, highlighted the potential of digital tools to transform agricultural markets considering the recent growth in internet penetration. In his presentation, he mentioned a few potential suspects that are limiting the widescale application of these agriculture-focused digital innovations; including limited capacity and lack of investment in the local IT sectors, the limited functionality of digital solutions, resource-poor and digitally illiterate farmers, small landholdings with low productivity, fragmented and poorly coordinated value chains and finally high levels of crop, country, and context specificity limiting the efficacy of generic solutions.
Spielman also highlighted less obvious challenges and limitations that are constraining the widespread scale-up of digital innovations. Some of these factors and limitations include:
- Reliance on public and donor funding, leading to many donor-funded pilot projects with few paths to profitability.
- Relatively little venture capital or other forms of private investment due to high risk and too few risk-takers willing to bet on Africa.
- State micro-management of agricultural markets and digital technologies.
- Anti-competitive behavior usually beats digital solutions.
Ahmed Tobal, Advisor to the Minister, MALR in Egypt, walked the audience through efforts from MALR to transform the agriculture sector in Egypt as well as potential challenges and avenues that require concerted efforts from various stakeholders. Tobal highlighted the need to integrate the various digital tools and applications into a unified framework so that they can serve a broader audience and beneficiaries.
On another note, Fadi Abderadi, Associate Professor of Agricultural Economics at Cairo University emphasized the concept of introducing digital tools to the different stages of the agricultural value chain with a special focus on the nodes of the value chain within and beyond the farm gate.
Next came Dorra Fiani, President of the Knowledge Economy Foundation/Bashaier Networks. Fiani explained that Bashaier has adapted and implemented the value chain approach when developing all Bashaier digital tools because it is indeed the one unique strategy, not only to support smallholder farmers with extension services but also equip them with other services they are looking for, such as marketing.
Kibrom Abay, Egypt Country Program Leader and Research Fellow at IFPRI, opened the next session, where he described IFPRI’s ongoing efforts to build and evaluate a digital tool (Mobile Application) that can provide marketing and information support to farmers in Egypt. The key objective of this mobile application is to collect and disseminate market information to farmers in Egypt. Abay highlighted that this new project will be implemented in collaboration with the MALR, Cairo University, and other partners.
“In this workshop we are not only looking for success stories but also some lessons learned that will help us develop our next activities. We encourage our participants to share the challenges and limitations they faced” Abay continued.
The session started with launching IFPRI’s Egypt Agriculture Apps Repository. The repository aims to provide a list of agriculture digital tools meant to support smallholder farmers in Egypt.
While introducing the repository, Fatma Abdelaziz, Senior Research Associate at IFPRI said “Even though our repository includes a wide variety of services and features provided across different tools, it is not a complete or comprehensive list of all agriculture digital tools and is under development”.
During the session, agriculture-focused mobile application developers from different sectors demonstrated their mobile applications to the audience. The developers showcased the different features and services their applications provided and highlighted some of the functionalities that farmers can benefit from. The demonstrated mobile applications were: El Mofeed, Mahsouly, The pomegranate Guide, GeoAgroPro and IRWI. The audience were oriented with these mobile tools and engaged in discussion on the different services and features available in each.
The following session was a closed roundtable discussion whereby different technical experts from national and international organizations, donors, and private sector app developers were split into different discussion rooms to share best practice experiences and lessons learned in the design of mobile digital tools. The aim of this session was to draw synergies between different efforts as well as inform IFPRI’s ongoing project - to create a demand-driven agriculture mobile application for farmers in Egypt.
IFPRI’s Egypt Agriculture Apps Repository
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