Using Kenya as a representative example for Sub-Saharan Africa

We have already identified Sub-Saharan Africa as the region with strongest growth potential for social agriculture. Kenya is a good indicator of technology adoption across the region, achieving higher general rates of smartphone adoption and internet use. Our analysis from The size of social agriculture globally indicates that Kenya is also one of the more active and larger scale social agriculture audiences in Sub-Saharan Africa. We expect that many findings from Kenya will be transferable to other countries in the region, especially as social media audiences grow.

Kenya is also interesting because its boasts some of the most advanced payment infrastructure in Africa — the mobile money service MPESA. This makes it more likely that e-commerce findings seen at the cutting edge of social agriculture in China might by more transferable to Kenya (though we concede there are big differences between the digital payment landscape of the two countries). Much of Kenya's online activity, including in relation to social agriculture, is in English. This makes it significantly easier for us to do granular level analysis, e.g. looking at textual content of posts in groups. Finally, many of the largest scale social agricultural groups we found in Sub Saharan Africa originated in Kenya. These reasons make Kenya a good target for us — this section focuses on social agriculture found in, or originating from Kenya.

Why look at 'groups' for social agriculture?

"Digital groups" were seen to have the biggest impact for Kenyans on social media with an interest in agriculture — we surveyed over 300 Kenyans using social media for agricultural purposes, and found participants ****voted for groups more than twice as often as any other category ****when asked about the impact of key features of digital services. Service features included groups, payment, and video.

[Source: learn.ink farmer survey](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSUOZ0J6yYj0G_IJP9DAq__n5aTw2PDexZHYNtLw2Igm3mj-VSU9SRTpdt3Pltq9EKCj9XoQeUL1ajo/pubchart?oid=1285389212&format=interactive)

Source: learn.ink farmer survey

The terminology of a 'group' features regularly in examples of social agriculture — when we examine social agricultural practices across geographies and platforms the terminology of 'group' is explicit in many of the platform features they depend on. These range from a "WhatsApp group" of local farmers to share tips and ideas in India to a "Facebook group" to market livestock and connect with others in Kenya to a "Pinduoduo buying group" to purchase fresh produce from a farmer in China.

Facebook dominates the social media landscape for farming in Kenya — Individuals cited the platform as their 'favourite' as well as being the 'most important' far more frequently than any other service. This finding supports our focus on using Facebook use as a leading indicator of social agriculture.

[Source: learn.ink farmer survey](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTH4N4nq_QGuJ1QHeJJw6f3C_EJWHuqIpViuN2c6oEsLWMiWoP2iRpEfIG6VAXDJ1ag4VMmhateI9Se/pubchart?oid=1099510413&format=interactive)

Source: learn.ink farmer survey

The ways groups manifest themselves depends heavily on the platform they are based on. Unfortunately the massive tapestry of groups of those working in agriculture across platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp and Pinduoduo globally is opaque. These platforms share little to no public data on groups. In the remainder of this section, we examine one of the more publicly visible, large scale, and widely used group types about which we can gather some data — Facebook groups.