The Inclusiveness of Digital Innovations in the South African Agriculture System - Closing the Inequality Gap through Innovation

Abstract

Inequalities in South Africa have been increasing since the end of Apartheid and are especially present in the agricultural sector between smallholder farmers (SHF) and commercial farmers. Novel digital technologies, also known as e-agriculture innovations, are emerging in South Africa’s agriculture sector. As it is not yet clear, how inequalities between SHFs and commercial farmers are affected by these novel e-agriculture technologies, their impact needs to be analyzed. Inclusive e-agriculture innovations appear to target challenges of SHFs and with that support their development and aim at the reduction of present inequalities. To further promote inclusive e-agriculture technologies, factors that hinder and factors that support their development and distribution have to be identified. This was done by conceptualizing inclusive innovation system (IIS) functions based on technology innovation systems functions combined with insights from inclusive innovation.

To execute the research, 28 semi-structured interviews with relevant system actors in the South African e-agriculture sector were conducted. In a first research step, most pressing challenges for SHFs in the South African e-agriculture sector were analyzed. These have been identified to be the exclusion of SHFs from the formal market due to strict market standards, which are almost impossible for SHFs to fulfill. Moreover, certain SHFs characteristics, such as their unorganized nature, hamper collaborations with SHFs and their integration into the market. Within the second research step, the development and distribution of e-agriculture innovations was analyzed by applying the IIS functions approach. This indicated that knowledge regarding the needs of SHFs is often lacking, present policies are weakly enforced, access to funding is limited and uncertainties of farmers regarding the usefulness of the technologies hamper adoption. At the same time, a strong willingness of all system actors towards the inclusion of SHFs and the development of inclusive e-agriculture has been observed. In a third step, potentially inclusive innovations have been analyzed regarding their impact on SHFs as well as their responsiveness towards their challenges. In this regard four mobile phone applications, three satellite data enabled technologies and one IoT device have been identified to target these challenges. E-agriculture technologies mainly pursued two approaches to integrate SHFs. Firstly, technologies assist the integration of SHFs by modifying current system requirements. Secondly, technologies support SHFs in their adoption to the present system requirements were observed. Therefore, inclusive e-agriculture technologies have been identified to be able to support SHFs and should be further promoted by resolving identified hindering factors.