<aside> ⬆️ back to The ecosystem of 'social agriculture'

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In this section:

The size of social agriculture versus digital agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa

In an earlier section we discussed What is 'social agriculture', and why should we care? There we highlighted a distinction between 'social agriculture' and 'digital agriculture' where the latter was understood as "digital platforms created by foreign and local tech firms... promoted as generating opportunities for farmers, shaping a vision of digitised agriculture". We made the case that these two categories were different, but in this section we ask: which category — social agriculture or digital agriculture — is actually reaching more people?

The size of digital agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa

Source: The Digitalisation of African Agriculture Report 2018-2019

A recent report on the Digitalisation of African Agriculture provides an extensive overview of 'digital agriculture' (D4Ag) services, and draws on a database "that tracks 390 active D4Ag solutions in Sub-Saharan Africa". A list of the top 20 solutions (by registered users) in the report is provided below:

Top 20 solutions, by number of registered users

In order to build an estimate of the number of active digital agriculture users we highlight the following key findings:

• Across 390 active services analysed there are a combined 33.1 million registered users of Digital Agriculture (D4Ag) services across Sub-Saharan Africa
• The 20 solutions listed above (~5% of the total) account for over 80% of all registrations. We can therefore assume that the long tail of services will not significantly affect sizing estimates.
• The percentage of accounts used "regularly enough for the users to feel the full benefit of the solution" is 15-30% of the registered user base — this is rather vaguely formulated, but reads like an active user estimate (similar to the 'Monthly Active User' metric used by social media platforms).

While the report highlights the number of 'registered D4Ag users' (33.1 million), this is not comparable with our earlier estimate of users engaged in social agriculture. This is because "registered user" metrics are regarded as poor indicators of anything meaningful in the consumer facing technology sector (companies like Facebook and Pinduoduo report 'monthly active users' to shareholders, not registered users). If we accept 22.5% as the mid-point of the active rate (which still seems suspiciously high), we arrive at a more reasonable estimate for the number of users actively involved in digital agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2018 — this comes to around 7.5M users.