FSD Uganda Logo
Search...
How to narrow the gender gap in digital agricultural platforms
Financial Sector Deepening Uganda (FSD Uganda)
Blog
Blog
How to narrow the gender gap in digital agricultural platforms
23/06/2023
FSD Uganda
How to narrow the gender gap in digital agricultural platforms
By Geoffrey Okidi
While digital agricultural platforms can boost farmer productivity, they also risk entrenching gender
inequalities if not gender intentional. Research shows that only 25% of Sub-Saharan Africa digital
agricultural platform users are women, and they are not served sufficiently.
Based on the best practices framework for incorporating gender into digital agricultural platforms
developed by ISF Advisors and Value for Women (VfW) with support from Consultative Group to Assist
the Poor (CGAP) (December 2022), this blog identifies four key opportunities to create shared value for
platforms and the women that engage with them.
Embedding gender into the organisational strategy: To become gender intentional, a good place to start
is for the platform to develop a holistic gender strategy, with clear objectives and targets defined using
their data. This will enable the platform to unlock new market opportunities, improve organisational
performance, and reach scale more quickly. The gender strategy should include key performance
indicators to assess progress towards targets, and measure success (e.g., active usage, disaggregated by
sex, measured quarterly; percentage of women in leadership, measured annually).With the gender
strategy in hand, the platform should then develop a gender action plan, outlining specific actions that
need to be implemented to reach the gender goals outlined in the strategy (with roles/ responsibilities,
allocated resources/ budget, and the timeline for completion of each action).
Leveraging sex-disaggregated data for better decision-making: The collection and analysis of sex-
disaggregated data is the typical starting point for increasing gender inclusion inside a company and
through its products and services. Data can tell how many women a platform is serving, how well it is
serving women, and the value being generated by women as customers and/or agents. Therefore, a
systematic approach to data collection and data-driven decision-making can help platforms leverage
their data for commercial and gender outcomes. Platforms can start to do this through the following:a)
Target setting and prioritisation: Once a platform has defined their gender strategy and associated key
performance indicators, they should establish a strategy-priorities-targets-measurement system
centered around data. This will enable action on priorities.
b) Understanding customer patterns: An important step is for platforms to sex-disaggregate existing
data– such as customer ratings or satisfaction scores –to understand satisfaction levels for different sub-
segments of women (and other users, such as men and youth). Platforms can also collect data through
publicly available datasets, focus groups, and feedback pop-ups on the platform.
c) Designing products: Insight into customer patterns from the preceding action can then be leveraged in
the product design process. This could result in finding ‘quick wins’ (i.e., shifting land requirements from
individual names to family names given barriers for women to access land) or more robust product shifts
(i.e., designing products specifically for women
Experimenting with women-focused innovations: Platforms can leverage their own data and industry
leading practices to continuously innovate. A good place to start is by looking at the current platform
offering with a gender lens to determine if there are any “quick wins” that can be achieved. Collecting
user feedback on the offerings available and sex-disaggregating these findings could be helpful. Based
on the context and platform model, there are promising platform innovations that provide inspiration.
For example
i. Use of in-person agents to increase registration for digital marketplaces (e.g., DigiFarm Village
Advisors)
ii. Use of interactive features, such as Interactive Voice Response technology, to make digital tools easier
to use by digitally illiterate customers and to deliver capacity building and advisory to customers (e.g.,
Opportunity International Uganda)
iii. Offering preferential terms to users earning income on the platform (e.g., zero registration fees,
referral bonuses) as an incentive to onboard rural women customers (e.g., Jumia’s Women & Youth
Empowerment Program)
iv. Providing tailored training and services to increase the income-generating potential of women
platform users (e.g., Copia’s asset financing product)Rural women should be embedded throughout the
product and service design process. Concretely, this means including a representative sample of both
men and women customers in market research efforts, testing prototypes with women, and collecting
sex-disaggregated feedback.
Increasing income generating opportunities for women as service providers: Evidence shows that
women tend to be successful field agents. An IFC study of agent transactions in the Democratic Republic
of Congo (May 2016) found that women were significantly more successful than male agents in terms of
volume and value of transactions. The abundance of platform field-based positions provides a unique
opportunity for women to integrate into more formalised labour, expand their earning potential, and
pursue a career that works with their household responsibilities and personal aspirations.Of note is that
capacity building is key to supporting women who earn an income on the platform. Tailored support
could include:
i) Providing digital literacy training,
ii) Training on how to use the platform,
iii) Value-added financial services (e.g., credit, insurance, or savings products),
iv) Providing assets necessary for livelihoods earned on the platform (e.g., smartphones,
v) Access to support networks within the platform ecosystem
References (58)
J.C. Aker et al.
Can mobile phones improve agricultural outcomes? Evidence from a randomized experiment in Niger
Food Policy
(2016)
A. Camacho et al.
The impact of receiving SMS price and weather information on small scale farmers in Colombia
World Dev.
(2019)
G. Clarkson et al.
Can the TV makeover format of edutainment lead to widespread changes in farmer behaviour and
influence innovation systems? Shamba Shape Up in Kenya
Land Use Policy
(2018)
T. Daum et al.
Smartphone apps as a new method to collect data on smallholder farming systems in the digital age: A
case study from Zambia
Comput. Electron. Agric.
(2018)
H. El Bilali et al.
Transition towards sustainability in agriculture and food systems: role of information and
communication technologies
Inf. Process. Agric.
(2018)
J. Ellis-Jones et al.
Taking to scale adaptable climate-smart technologies
Smart Technologies for Sustainable Smallholder Agriculture
(2017)
R. Kabbiri et al.
Mobile phone adoption in agri-food sector: Are farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa connected?
Technol. Forecast. Soc. Change
(2018)
B. Kiiza et al.
ICT-based market information and adoption of agricultural seed technologies: insights from Uganda
Telecommun. Policy
(2012)
M. Salampasis et al.
Information and communication technology in agricultural development preface
Procedia Technol.
(2013)
G. Tadesse et al.
Mobile phones and farmers’ marketing decisions in Ethiopia
World Dev.
(2015)
WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT, AGRICULTURAL EXTENSION, AND DIGITALIZATION
by Els Lecoutere, David Spielman, and Bjorn Van Campenhout | March 9, 2020
Disentangling information and role model effects in rural Uganda
The intrinsic value of empowering women farmers in developing countries is recognized as a
fundamentally important element in the process of social and economic development. Women can play
a critical role in decision-making on the allocation of scarce resources for household consumption,
investment, and production choices. In a farm household, these investment and production choices
include decisions like what crops to cultivate, what inputs and technologies to use, and how to manage
these crops throughout the season, among many others. Taken together, women’s roles in multiple
decisions have important consequences for labor, food, nutrition, health, and many other facets of a
household’s livelihood strategies.
However, women often have less access to information than men, including information about
productivity-enhancing agricultural technologies and practices. This can constrain women’s informed
participation in decision-making on crops, technologies, and practices. Often, it is a consequence of the
fact that male farm-household heads are targeted by agricultural extension programs. At least two
strong assumptions explain the persistence of this form of discrimination: all information flows freely
within the household from men to women, and women are insignificant actors in agricultural
production.
Field experiment
With these two assumptions in mind, we recently conducted a field experiment with monogamous
smallholder maize-producing farm-households in Uganda to examine the impacts on women’s
empowerment from the use of gender-responsive information and communications technology (ICT) in
the provision of extension services. We focus on the use of informational videos to assess the impact of
both providing women with direct access to video-based extension information and featuring women as
information providers in the videos themselves. This helps us test the impacts of passing information to
women and of projecting a woman farmer as a role model. We estimate the impacts of these videos by
measuring the impacts on women’s knowledge, their agency, and their achievements in farming.
In the context of our study, we define women’s empowerment as the state in which women have
greater ability to make and act upon choices, both individually and jointly with their male co-head within
the household.
Our intervention consisted of short informational and aspirational videos, screened on tablet
computers, that provide viewers with verbal recommendations and visual demonstrations of
appropriate input use, management practices, and investment strategies to obtain higher maize yields.
Photo by Bjorn Van Campenhout (IFPRI)
Our field experiment uses a factorial design, illustrated in the figure below. The first “factor” is the
gender of the person(s) who receives the extension information in the video. The videos were randomly
shown by our enumerators to either the male co-head of the household, the female co-head, or the
male and female co-heads together as a couple. Varying the gender of the information recipient(s)
allowed us to test our hypothesis about the importance to women’s empowerment of improving
women’s access to information.
The second “factor” is the gender of the person(s) who delivers the information in the video. One video
features a male actor only, another features a female actor only, and a third features both actors
together. Otherwise, each video features exactly the same content and script. The different versions of
the video were shown randomly to participants in the experiment. Varying the gender of the
information provider(s) allowed us to test our hypothesis about the importance of female role models to
women’s empowerment.
Figure 1: Experimental design and sample sizes in each treatment arm
By crossing these two factors, participants in the experiment were assigned to one of nine possible
treatment combinations (Figure 1).
We conducted the experiment in five districts of eastern Uganda, where maize is both a staple and
marketable crop. We showed the video to participants in July 2017, prior to maize planting, and again in
August 2017, during planting time. Endline data were collected following the harvest in January 2018.
To test our intrahousehold information asymmetry hypothesis, we compared women’s empowerment
outcomes between households where the female co-head watched the video alone or as part of a
couple and households where the male co-ahead alone watched the video (Table 2 Model 1).
To test our hypothesis on role model effects, we compared women’s empowerment outcomes when a
female actor featured in the video, either alone or as part of a couple, with outcomes when only a male
actor featured in the video (Table 2 Model 2).
Table 2: Hypotheses tests. Light gray cells represent the treatment group used to test the specific
hypothesis and dark gray cells represent the control group. M=man; W=woman; C=couple
Findings
The findings of our experiment are complex and nuanced, but provide potentially important insights for
ICT-enabled extension programs.
First, we found that having women (i.e., not just the male co-heads) receive information had positive
effects on women’s knowledge outcomes. We also found that men’s knowledge outcomes were
negatively affected when the information was only given to the female co-head—meaning women may
not share information with their spouses either.
Second, we found that women participated more in decision-making when they had received
information, particularly when they alone received it. Joint decision-making remained unchanged.
Conversely, men’s individual decision-making was reduced when women received information.
Third, women not only gained in terms of decision-making, but they also increased actual adoption of
recommended inputs and management practices. These gains were observed in both women’s
individual decision-making and in joint decision-making of female and male co-heads.
Fourth, the total area of the household maize plots that were managed by women increased as a result
of providing only women with information, and maize production on those female-managed plots more
than doubled. There is no evidence of any increase in maize production, productivity, or area under
cultivation for jointly managed plots when women received information, not even when they received it
together with the male co-head.
Fifth, when women received information, they were also more likely to independently sell maize—and
in larger quantities—if they alone received the information, while men were less likely to sell maize. We
saw no effect on joint sales of maize, even if the couple received information together.
In short, these results point to several strong informational effects. Our role model treatment, however,
returned mixed results. We found no impact of featuring a female actor in the video—either alone or
with a male actor—on women’s knowledge outcomes, their individual decision-making, or their
adoption of recommended practices. We also found indications of a negative effect on yields on female-
managed plots and the sales of maize by women.
However, we did find a positive role model effect on women’s decision to use organic fertilizer. This may
reflect the ready availability of organic fertilizer and the possibility that women do not have to bargain
with men over its use.
Finally, we found no role model effects on joint outcomes, apart from an increase in the joint sale of
maize, and negative effects on men’s individual decision-making and the quantity of maize
independently sold by men, which may have resulted from greater involvement of women in decision-
making and action.
Overall, our findings suggest that extension programs aimed at providing women with information—
thereby addressing intrahousehold information asymmetries—may be a first-best means of empowering
women in agriculture. Other, more subtle means that seek to influence perceptions and norms about
gendered roles in the household by projecting women role models may not generate expected effects,
though they remain worth further exploration.
For more information on our experimental methods and findings, please see:
Lecoutere, Els; Spielman, David J.; and Van Campenhout, Bjorn. 2019. Women’s empowerment,
agricultural extension, and digitalization: Disentangling information and role model effects in rural
Uganda. IFPRI Discussion Paper no. 1889. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute.
https://doi.org/10.2499/p15738coll2.133523
Authors
Els Lecoutere is a post-doctoral researcher at the Development Economics Group, Wageningen
University, the Netherlands, and an associated post-doctoral research fellow with the Institute of
Development Policy at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. David Spielman is a senior research fellow in
the Development Strategy and Governance Division of the International Food Policy Research Institute
(IFPRI), Washington, DC, USA. Bjorn Van Campenhout is a research fellow in the same division of IFPRI
and an associate research fellow of the LICOS Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance at KU
Leuven, Belgium.
This study was carried out with financial support from Digital Green and the U.S. Agency for
International Development (USAID) under Feed the Future’s Developing Local Extension Capacity (DLEC)
project; the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM), led by the
International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI); the CGIAR Research Program on Maize (MAIZE), led
by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT); and the International
Development Research Center (IDRC), Ottawa, Canada (grant no. 109177-001), through the CGIAR
Collaborative Platform for Gender Research. The CGIAR programs and platforms, in turn, are supported
by these funders. The study is registered in the American Economic Association RCT Registry (#AEARCTR-
0002153), and received approval from IFPRI’s Institutional Review Board (IRB). The views expressed
herein do not necessarily represent those of Digital Green, USAID, IDRC or its Board of Governors, or the
CGIAR research programs, platforms, and centers mentioned above.
This story is part of the EnGendering Data blog which serves as a forum for researchers, policymakers,
and development practitioners to pose questions, engage in discussions, and share resources about
promising practices in collecting and analyzing sex-disaggregated data on agriculture and food security.
