[kictanet] Your thoughts and feedback on Aggregator Platforms for Digital Services in Agriculture.
Benson Muite
benson_muite at emailplus.org
Tue Mar 30 10:08:12 EAT 2021
Dear John,
Thanks for an interesting read. Understanding how digital platforms can
help grow an economic sector is very important.
To help grow the reputation of the Kenyan knowledge economy, it would be
great if you can also increase the visibility of your article and also
the Kenyan knowledge economy. The journal policies allow you to post
the article to institutional repositories:
https://www.elsevier.com/authors/submit-your-paper/sharing-and-promoting-your-article
https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/copyright
As an example, Covenant University in Nigeria requires all publications
to be hosted on their institutional repository a forward looking policy
that ensures that research discovery is easier and that the reputation
of Covenant University and Nigeria as places of knowledge generation are
enhanced. This research discovery problem is similar to the platform
discovery problem you examine, and could be an object of study in its
own right. Research originating primarily from African institutions may
be more difficult to find than research originating from regions with a
high per capita income. By also making your research available on your
institutional repository, you can contribute to alleviating the African
research discovery problem.
Making your survey data available for others to use (possibly with some
anonymization), would be nice.
Instead of Atlas.ti could you use:
1) qdap https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/qdap/
2) rqda http://rqda.r-forge.r-project.org/
3) KH coder http://khcoder.net/en/
if the data can be made available, this would enable others to more
easily reproduce and/or extend your qualitative analysis. It would also
allow for examination of the algorithms used in performing the
qualitative analysis to check they are doing something reasonable.
Selection bias will be important. Your choice of survey technique is
cost effective for the surveyor, but will primarily capture farmers with
good digital access (smartphones or computers). Kenyan census data shows
that most people do not have such access on a regular basis, and so the
survey will likely miss out on many small scale farmers as well as
people working in cattle rearing who may have no fixed abode. The cost
of data, even when one has a smartphone or computer, is also relatively
high. As an example Twiga foods primarily uses their platform in
regions close to Nairobi, probably partly because of the above reasons.
It would be helpful to know to what extent having a smartphone/computer
with internet access gives rise to greater income from being able to
access a digital platform. Could SMS communication with occasional
internet access for example at an internet cafe be sufficient to obtain
similar income increases?
Economies of scale in agriculture often mean that only a small
proportion of people are employed in the agricultural sector in high
productivity economies. If the survey is repeated several times in
future, it may be good to capture the extent to which people move to
other sectors and digital platforms increase production productivity and
access to markets.
Could the survey be done on a regional basis rather than a country
basis? There are a number of free trade areas within Africa, with cross
border trade being quite important in ensuring customers get high
quality produce at fair prices - as an example Uganda exports
agricultural produce to Kenya since it has more favorable environmental
conditions for many types of farming. Production incentives and
education are still mostly confined to the country of production.
Comparing different countries can be quite informative on appropriate
policy actions to take. This might also require your survey to be
available in languages such as Kiswahili, French and Arabic.
You raise important issues on platform accessibility. One other area of
concern with digital platforms is data confidentiality. In a competitive
market with many players, all can benefit from the collected data. Such
data aggregation can also be helpful in preventing food shortages and
oversupply. In a market with only a few players, or a few large players
who can influence price, data sharing may be more problematic and each
of the players will likely create their own digital platform if they can.
Finally, within Kenya, one might want to compare different counties, so
geographical information would be good to add to future surveys.
Regards,
Benson
On 3/29/21 11:55 AM, John Kieti via kictanet wrote:
> Thanks, @Ali, Looking forward to your thoughts.
>
> @Benson Since the article already went past the formal peer-review
> process and got published (via Elsevier), pre-print servers may not be
> applicable. It's also an open-access (CC BY 4.0) article which should
> free it up for circulation. But thanks for the idea of pre-print servers
> - I could use them for some pending publications. So I am slightly less
> of an academic and a little more of a practitioner. Therefore am quite
> keen to hear what fellow practitioners (and policy folks) think of the
> findings and their relevance (irrelevance?) - to practice and policy in
> Kenya.
>
> Kind regards
>
> On Mon, Mar 29, 2021 at 7:21 AM Ali Hussein <ali at hussein.me.ke
> <mailto:ali at hussein.me.ke>> wrote:
>
> John
>
> Thanks for sharing. Definitely an important read. Will purpose to
> read in-depth and give you feedback.
>
> Regards
>
> *Ali Hussein*
>
> Digital Transformation
>
>
> Tel: +254 713 601113
>
> Twitter: @AliHKassim
>
> Skype: abu-jomo
>
> LinkedIn: http://ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim
> <http://ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim><http://ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim>
>
>
>
>
> Any information of a personal nature expressed in this email are
> purely mine and do not necessarily reflect the official positions of
> the organizations that I work with.
>
>
> On Sun, Mar 28, 2021 at 12:25 PM John Kieti via kictanet
> <kictanet at lists.kictanet.or.ke
> <mailto:kictanet at lists.kictanet.or.ke>> wrote:
>
> Dear Esteemed Listers,
>
> Reports by AGRA and Disrupt Africa consistently position Kenya
> as the global leader in the number of tech ventures and digital
> solutions for agriculture (DSAs). By GSMA's 2020 report which
> tracked 713 active DSAs, more than half (437) were in sub
> Saharan Africa. Kenya led with 95 and Nigeria was at a distant
> second with about half of Kenya's number. Studies have
> questioned the ability of these DSAs to scale out so as to
> significantly impact a sector that is the mainstay of most sub
> Saharan African economies (including Kenya).
>
> My co-authors and I sought to contribute in diversifying the
> thinking about efforts to unlock the promise of digitalisation
> and digital transformation of agriculture in sub Saharan Africa.
> We conceptualised an aggregator platform for digital services in
> agriculture (AP4DSA). This is a special type of digital platform
> for agriculture whose characteristics can partiallybe observed
> in nascent platforms such as Safaricom's DigiFarm, EcoFarmer in
> Zimbabwe, Bayer's Climate FieldView, and an "imaginary instance
> of Google play store for agriculture". Such a platform can be
> expected to address DSA discoverability challenges including
> fragmentation of the digital agriculture ecosystem, absence of a
> one-stop-shop, and an unmet desire for comprehensiveness.
>
>
> We proceeded to examine the underlying structure of value
> creation sources in such a digital platform as perceived by
> likely users in Kenya. We recently published our findings in the
> Digital Business Journal on the link below (pdf downloadable)
>
> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666954421000065
> <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666954421000065> (see
> also attached graphical abstract)
>
>
> I take this early opportunity to invite listers' review of our
> findings. I am particularly wishful for feedback about the
> issues of valuechaincoverageand digitalinclusivity, which our
> research finds as sub-themes of platforminclusivity, a major
> theme on amplifying the value of such a platform.
>
>
> Kind regards.
>
>
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> --
>
> John Kieti
> Phone: +254-735-764242 // +254-722-764242
> Twitter: @johnKieti <https://twitter.com/johnkieti> // Skype: jkieti***
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