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www.ictworks.org/smallholder-fa...ne-agriculture/

ICTWorks. 2020

ICTforAg services and solutions disseminated through mobile phones offer the promise to connect millions of smallholder farmers and improve their access to agricultural information. While new ICT4Ag solutions come online every day, there is an open question of whether farmers access these services equally.

This is an interest across development actors as NGOs, private industry, and governments invest in agtech and develop mobile-based technologies. Because the landscape is changing as fast as these technologies are coming online, there is a need for improved measures on collecting baseline information. In 2017, USAID published a survey toolkit on gender and ICT to standardize metrics for quantifying gendered differences in ICT use to meet this challenge.

We used this toolkit to survey more than 500 smallholder farmers in the semiarid highlands of central Kenya, specifically Laikipia, Meru and Nyeri counties in March 2018.