Extension workers using Digital Green’s tools to provide real-time, personalized farming advice to a smallholder farmer.
Digital Green (DG) collaborates with public, private, and non-profit organizations to enhance small-scale farmers’ access to timely, actionable, and localized agricultural recommendations. In Ethiopia, partnerships with the Ministry of Agriculture, Regional Bureaus of Agriculture, and the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Institute have strengthened the country’s extension services. Development Agents (DAs), field-level extension staff, use scalable digital tools to expand their reach and effectiveness, fostering sustainable, farmer-focused advisory systems.
Key innovations include digital tools like farmer and DA registries, the FarmStack data-sharing protocol, and a context-specific chatbot, all of which enable tailored advisories. By integrating data from research institutions like CGIAR, Digital Green provides customized recommendations, such as fertilizer optimization and climate-smart practices, improving productivity while minimizing environmental impacts.
Complementing digital extension, the organization supports women’s self-help groups (SHGs) and youth-led enterprises (YLEs) to foster social inclusion, economic empowerment, and environmental stewardship. SHGs engage in savings, lending, and income-generating activities, while YLEs contribute to agroforestry, reforesting over 2,700 hectares. Observing these successes, government partners are scaling SHG and YLE initiatives to neighboring communities.
Digital Green’s theory of change posits that the expanded adoption of its farmer-centric model—designed to empower farmers with informed decision-making capabilities tailored to their information needs, labor and financial constraints, and other contextual factors—will lead to the adoption of beneficial farm practices and enhanced self-efficacy (the confidence in one’s ability to improve personal circumstances). These changes are expected to drive downstream outcomes for participating farmers, including increased incomes and greater climate resilience. This approach aligns with Digital Green’s organizational goals of reaching 5 million farmers (60% women) with high-quality, timely advisory information and improving the incomes of participating farmers by 30% by 2028.
To enhance outcomes for farmers, Digital Green will develop features designed to improve the relevance and accuracy of chatbot responses, as well as increase user engagement and satisfaction. Feature testing will be conducted in Kenya, India, and Nigeria, while the resulting advancements will benefit all regions where the app is deployed. Examples of hypothesized features are outlined below, though specific features may evolve or new ones may be added based on ongoing product testing and user feedback.
To enhance response relevance, Digital Green will explore features that improve user interactions with Farmer.Chat, including:
To ensure messages are gender-responsive within the local context, Digital Green will continue prompt-engineering efforts to refine chatbot capabilities. This includes tailoring responses to meet the information needs of women farmers by addressing their specific questions, ensuring advice is actionable, and accounting for women’s labor burdens, roles, and responsibilities in farming, markets, and households. These responses will also be delivered in an appropriate tone that aligns with local gender dynamics.
To broaden access to content, Digital Green is developing and testing features that improve the accessibility and usability of information for farmers. Examples include: