- Poster
Using methods from Human Centered Design to improve adoption of digital agricultural solutions amongst small holder farmers
- July 12, 2024
- 11:34 am
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PROJECT TYPE
DOI
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BEHAVIORAL THEME
OVERVIEW
The field of digital agriculture is evolving quickly, with the number of digital agriculture solution providers servicing low—to middle-income countries increasing rapidly. However, adopting and using these digital services is not as linear as simply making them available in a new geography for new farmers.
Designing, implementing, and scaling new technological innovations in a specific geographical context must account for challenges unique to that area. Beyond technological proficiency, farmers make decisions about adopting new technologies and services based on various factors like cost, availability, risk, value, and social norms.
The Busara Center for Behavioral Economics is conducting research with five digital service providers in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Our research aims to identify enablers and barriers to smallholder farmers’ adoption and use of digital services and develop and test solutions to increase this uptake.
THEMATIC AREAS
Through our work with providers, we have identified various underlying factors that drive adoption and usage. We are helping digital providers better understand how to encourage behaviors linked with the adoption of digital products and services. Our approach involves leveraging techniques from Human-Centered Design (HCD), which we’ve found to be highly effective in achieving these objectives. Through this HCD methodology, we prioritize users and their experiences, placing them at the forefront of the design process to develop solutions tailored to their contexts.
As part of our research, we have developed 12 intervention ideas across five different provider geographies. We are testing these interventions in a lab setting via behaviour games.
Some interesting findings from our results include (i) highlighting benefits via audio or visual cues leads to higher information recall and trust in the information received ;
(ii) farmers are more likely to respect and seek out their representative farmer when these representatives are chosen with community approval as opposed to being appointed externally.
