Documents and publications
There are a number of publications in ICTs for agriculture that are published by e-Agriculture, and also in conjunction with partners. This section collects these publications and those from our partners that are relevant to ICTs for agriculture.
Leveraging digital innovation to promote agricultural insurance among small-scale farmers
09/03/2026
Despite its gradual rise in popularity, the field of insurance technology (Insurtech) in most low- and middle-income countries remains significantly underdeveloped, especially regarding its applications in agriculture. Relatively few solutions to enhance the efficiency, delivery, and affordability of agri-insurance among small-scale farmers have reached a significant scale as of yet, and even when they have, these have tended to be concentrated in contexts where digital financial innovation is already quite advanced, such as the East Africa region.
Categories: Insurance , Artificial Intelligence , digital financial services
Digital vouchers as a market-based instrument for seed sector commercialization in Afghanistan. Phase I: Early findings
20/01/2026
Under the Emergency Food Security Project (EFSP), funded by the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has launched a large‑scale seed commercialization initiative in Afghanistan. The new approach responds to challenges including liquidity constraints among farming households, seed price affordability for smallholders and weak, fragmented market linkages between farmers and domestic seed producers. These constraints are often more pronounced for women farmers, who face additional mobility and access barriers to agricultural inputs and services.
Categories: Digital technologies in Agriculture (ICTs) , commercial farmers
Digital Agriculture and AI Innovation Roadmap
31/12/2025
The Digital agriculture and AI innovation roadmap crystallizes a shared vision: an agrifood future where innovation is inclusive, trusted, and relentlessly focused on impact. Developed through a multistakeholder dialogue, the roadmap translates the high-level ambition of more efficient, inclusive, resilient and sustainable agrifood systems (AFS) into a three-year action plan that moves the sector decisively beyond fragmented pilots towards an ecosystem that fosters collaboration, reuse, and contextual adaptation.
Categories: Artificial Intelligence
Farmers’ willingness to pay for a digital extension tool in Sri Lanka. An economic application of list experiments
11/11/2025
List experiments utilize indirect survey questions to reduce social desirability bias in measures of sensitive behaviours and sentiments. While often used to assess retrospective behaviour or opinions of respondents, list experiments have not been widely applied to assessing “deep” parameters of economic models, such as willingness to pay. Common stated preference methods of estimating willingness to pay may be impacted by social desirability bias, particularly when a product has been provided to survey recipients for free.
Categories: extension-advisory services , digital financial services
Gender-responsive digital extension and advisory services in Bangladesh and India
10/11/2025
Digital technologies are rapidly transforming how agricultural knowledge and services are delivered, offering promising avenues to bridge gaps in access to information, markets, and decision-making for rural populations. In South Asia, particularly in Bangladesh and India, digital extension and advisory services (EAS) are increasingly being adopted to support smallholder farmers. However, these innovations often fail to adequately account for gender-based disparities in access, use, and benefit.
Categories: extension-advisory services
Artificial intelligence for food safety. A literature synthesis, real-world applications and regulatory frameworks
28/10/2025
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly applied in food safety management, offering new capabilities in data analysis, predictive modelling, and risk-based decision-making. A review of the literature identifies three primary areas of application: scientific advice, inspection and border control, and operational activities of food safety competent authorities. Five country examples with the real-world use cases illustrate diverse uses of AI tools, including pathogen detection, import sampling prioritization, and language models for regulatory data processing.
Categories: Artificial Intelligence , food safety