Echoing other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, smallholder farmers in Ghana struggle to access essential agronomic, market, and financial information needed to make informed agricultural decisions. Digital agricultural services hold great promise for providing this information, yet significant barriers hinder their widespread adoption and scalability.
This blog provides insights on how Esoko is leveraging field agents to unlock the adoption and scale of its digital solutions among smallholder farmers.
Challenges of Scaling Digital Agricultural Services in Ghana
Digital agricultural services (DAS) are transforming farming practices across the globe; their potential benefits to smallholder farmers, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, are promising. However, the full potential of DAS remains largely untapped due to numerous barriers. These obstacles include technological challenges, such as limited access to internet connectivity and electricity, as well as human and market constraints, like mistrust, social norms, and low digital literacy. Together, these factors hinder the widespread adoption of these innovative solutions.
Low digital literacy: In 2024, mobile connections in Ghana grew to 38.95 million, representing 113% of the population, yet digital literacy is below 30%. Low digital literacy is more pronounced among older individuals and female farmers. Addressing this challenge needs targeted capacity-building to improve marginalised farmers’ abilities to utilise digital solutions.
Social norms: Gender roles and cultural norms contribute to gender disparities in the adoption of digital services. Female farmers, who make up about 50% of the agricultural labour force, are less likely than their male counterparts to own and use mobile phones – the primary access point for DAS. This represents a critical opportunity gap in scaling these services.
Limited awareness and trust: Low awareness of DAS is a consequence of ineffective outreach channels that do not reach the target farmers and ineffective messaging of the services’ value proposition. Besides, some farmers have raised concerns over user safety, driven by the existence of similar-looking services run by scammers, leading to mistrust among farmers.
Esoko enhances delivery and scale of DAS through agent networks
Connecting last-mile communities to markets and information through digital solutions
Through its Digmkt service, Esoko keeps farmers informed about good agronomic practices and market prices for over 50 commodities in Ghana, enabling farmers to make informed decisions when selling their commodities. They also deliver weather forecasts and early warning systems. This information is delivered through SMS, voice SMS, IVR and a dedicated call centre.
Leveraging agent networks to overcome scaling challenges
Given the low digital literacy and trust issues among smallholders, in-person interaction is still in high demand in farming communities.
Photo credit: Esoko
Esoko is leveraging field agents to bridge the gap between technology and human interaction through various methods.
Delivering farmer trainings
Esoko field agents engage with farmers weekly, typically in a group setting, delivering in-person training to help them use the services. These sessions involve demonstrations on how to access the services on their phones as well as guidance on interpreting the various messaging contents.
Promoting awareness and farmer trust
Esoko field agents regularly visit farmers in the last mile to raise awareness about its services. A key strength of Esoko’s agency model is that field agents are typically recruited from the same communities or nearby areas. As a result, agents understand local dynamics and can interact with farmers on a personal level, which increases farmers’ trust in Esoko’s digital solutions.
Fostering inclusivity in digital agriculture
To empower female farmers and promote gender equality, Esoko actively recruits female agents, who currently make up 27% of their agent network. Female agents not only create a conducive environment for female farmers to share data during registration and profiling but also increase their willingness to learn and use digital solutions
Overcoming challenges in agent management with Esoko agents’ app
Leveraging the agent network has enabled Esoko to reach over 350,000 farmers in Ghana. To achieve this scale, they engage hundreds of field agents in multiple communities simultaneously. Agents are managed centrally through agent managers that track and report on field activities.
However, managing such a large network does come with its challenges. For example, the lack of real-time monitoring of agents’ activities makes it difficult for agents’ managers to assign new tasks and audit agents’ activities and end-of-day reports. Besides, fragmented communication methods – emails, calls, WhatsApp and text messages – make it difficult for agent managers to track the flow of information, actions and tasks. While these channels work in most cases, important details often get lost across different platforms. Finally, manual reporting of field activities on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis makes it time-consuming for agent managers to collate and synthesise reports. Often, it results in discrepancies between field reports and back-office records.
An agent’s app to digitise interactions with farmers
Driven by the above-mentioned challenges, and with support from the GSMA AgriTech Accelerator, the Esoko team is developing an app that will enable efficient running of the agent network.
Real-time monitoring of agents’ activities
The app will enable Esoko to automatically gather a wide range of data, including the real-time location of agents during working hours. The app can also use geo-fencing technology to send instant notifications to guide agents on their designated operational zones. By leveraging real-time location data, agent managers can efficiently assign tasks to agents based on their areas of proximity. This feature will help to better manage the agent network’s capacity, optimise task allocation, and ensure both agents’ productivity and safety.
Workflow management and reporting
The app will help agents provide all their reports digitally and through one channel to their managers. It will include reporting forms with multiple-choice prompts, description boxes as well as capabilities to upload photos of their engagement. Offline capabilities also allow this data to be synchronised to the back office automatically. These reporting features will eliminate manual reporting’s inefficiencies and enhance report synthesis through dashboards. Additionally, agent managers will also be able to address issues faster and assign tasks promptly.
Centralised information handling
Using a single app to manage agent processes will ensure central management of information, to easily locate and retrieve data, insights or task completion records. Auditing agents’ activities to flush out challenges and make operations more efficient will be much easier than with previous information flows.
Agent onboarding
Once an agent is recruited, the app will provide guidance on onboarding tasks such as uploading their detailed profiles, completing compliance checks and reaching training milestones. This will save agent managers the time and effort of having to manually repeating these steps for each agent. The app will then notify managers of specific areas where agents need support to complete their onboarding, enabling a quick and at scalable onboarding process.
Impact and future outlook
Esoko aims to roll out the agents’ app by the end of 2024 to enhance agent management. The agents’ app is expected to reduce management efforts by at least 50%. This improvement will come from doubling the efficiency of task allocation to field agents, halving the time spent on reporting and synthesis, and reducing the time lost on manual processes. Besides, usage data from the app will be vital in guiding the next project, which will focus on building the agent managers’ interface to further complement the agents’ app. This increased efficiency will play an important role in enabling Esoko to scale its services further to reach an additional 30,000 farmers in the next two years.
