While being a part of ICTforAg was a great chance to reconnect and learn, it is amazing to me that we need to have conversations about the need to engage female farmers in AgTech. After all, Stamp’s Technology, Gender, and Power in Africa was first written in 1989 when I read it on microfiche, and little seems to have changed.
Agriculture is sexist. Poverty is sexist. And certainly, technology is sexist. These are three tenets that anyone working at the intersection of development and technology should inherently know, without the assistance of a “gender specialist.”
How is it that technology advocates remain so blind to gender (and other) biases that are imbued in many software platforms and services?
Far earlier than Stamp, Conway warned us about this phenomenon in technology in 1967, that any technology reflects the values of its creator. So when a white western software developer creates a crop management application for women in rural Mozambique – even if this developer served in the Peace Corps in Mali 15 years ago and focused on poultry initiatives – the result is not going to be a raging success.
Women Are Not Using ICT4Ag Solutions
In fact, our best AgTech minds collectively do not have a stellar track record outside of their good intentions. The uptake across this industry is abysmal, and this is not because the “end user” is not seeing the value proposition. It is because this customer, which is a far better way to reframe the relationship between implementer and intended that removes the latter out of the category of “charity case,” is not getting what s/he wants.
While we continue to follow the popular “challenge” model of digital development and hope that one thousand flowers bloom, let’s look at what happens when the bloom withers. AgTech apps are not being used to the degree we want and expect them to be:
- Krell’s work that shows only 25% of mobile-owning farmers use their mobiles for agricultural information, despite the dozens of applications than have been deployed up and down the Rift Valley.
- “The Revolution of Mobile Phone-Enabled Services for Agricultural Development (m-Agri Services) in Africa: The Challenges for Sustainability” in the November 2019 issue of Sustainability takes this further, yet barely mentions gender.
- Wyche and Olsen focus more specifically on women’s AgTech use, and the non-Kenyan-focus in the Feed the Future Bangladesh digital agriculture assessment (authored by Strategic Impact Advisors for DAI) rounds out the global context.
These and a larger literature review on ICT4D failures and mismatches should be required reading for all of the eternal optimists and technology determinists, who buy the hype that technology has the “potential” to revolutionize agricultural value chains in developing countries.
Of course, all technology has potential when modeled in the vacuum of our whiteboards and proposals. Rural smallholder farmer women do not live in vacuums. They live in tenuous economies that are challenged with migration, climate change, and societal challenges that implementers can barely conceptualize. If the AgTech application does not demonstrate tangible value immediately, it will not be used.
This is not necessarily a “doom and gloom” post. I also support the narrative that technology can be a catalyst of women’s empowerment, especially in agriculture. Women farmers are the backbone of society – and we should prioritize them in development interventions.
Digital development can scale and sustain information services in unprecedented ways. The combination of women and tech could be a major force-multiplier effect in development. We keep missing that opportunity, however, by creating and deploying tech that further marginalizes the very population we need to be flooding with support and effective programming.
I cover that in my ICTforAg video, which is a starting point to learn more about the dynamics and consequences of the gender digital divide. The more that donors and funders move toward digital development strategies across all traditional development sectors, the more women are falling behind. The faster that technology moves, the slower the trickle-down rate to women. It is a truly unbalanced equation.