Agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa remains low due to multiple challenges faced by smallholder farmers. Limited access to credit, market information, and infrastructure—along with high transaction costs—often hinder the adoption of new technologies (Jack et al., 2013; Suri & Udry, 2022). Since addressing a single constraint is often insufficient to drive productivity gains, agri-tech platform companies have emerged. They offer integrated solutions that tackle multiple constraints at once. Our team from the University of Passau together with Dr. Edward Asiedu (University of Ghana) and Prof. Jann Lay (University of Göttingen, GIGA) is collaborating with an agri-tech company to evaluate their impact on soybean farmers in Northern Ghana.
The North of Ghana experienced its most severe drought in four decades during the 2024 planting season, a severity that weather forecasts had not anticipated. Since agriculture is rainfed, it makes smallholder farmers highly vulnerable to climate variability. The unexpected drought disrupted agricultural activities, with some farmers bearing a heavier burden than others.
Our study draws on two waves of quantitative interviews conducted in June 2024 and January/February 2025. Like most farm households in the region, our sampled farmers operate in a complex environment where numerous factors shape household decisions and productivity. This research seeks to understand how drought severity influences agricultural production, land use, labor demand, income, and overall economic resilience.
Using a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach, we assess the drought’s effects by leveraging spatial variations in its severity. Since all farmers in our sample were exposed to the drought, differences in its intensity across locations allow us to identify its differential impacts. In addition to quantifying economic outcomes, we explore farmers’ perceptions of changing weather patterns and their adaptation strategies, which may vary based on drought severity. We hypothesize that more severe drought conditions lead to greater declines in agricultural yields, reduced labor demand and income losses, as well as sharper declines in asset holdings and financial security.
Given that some farmers received support from an agri-tech company or other regional institutions, we also assess whether these interventions mitigated the drought’s adverse effects. By examining farmers’ responses to climate shocks and the services they accessed during the 2024 agricultural season, we aim to generate insights on effective adaptation strategies.
Looking ahead, we plan to conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate the impact of bundled agricultural services offered by the agri-tech platform. These services include real-time weather updates, training on modern agricultural practices, soil testing with expert consultations, off-take agreements for secure market access, as well as input credit for seeds, fertilizers, and mechanization, with repayment in kind after harvest. We aim to show how these interventions help farmers overcome key challenges, boost productivity, and adapt to climate risks. We explore strategies that strengthen agricultural resilience and protect smallholder livelihoods in an increasingly unpredictable environment.
Digital Platforms are emerging and expanding in Africa. They serve as a marketplace, a training hub, a financial institution, and a sharing platform for transportation and machine services among many others. These opportunities are especially relevant for firms and farms in Sub-Saharan Africa given the limited market access, capital and information constraints they face. However, the potential of digital platforms to resolve such market frictions remains unexplored. Furthermore, little is known about which platform services actually benefit its subscribers and which do not. It is also important for researchers to understand how to increase the uptake of digital platforms and their services and how to make sure that potential users are able to work with them. Furthermore, the socio-economic impact of platforms on small businesses, farm households and rural communities and the platform’s contribution to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is yet to be investigated.
In order to address these research gaps, a team of Development Economists from the University of Passau, the University of Ghana and Tufts University in Boston, will conduct a field experiment in Ghana. Randomly selected entities will be part of a treatment group in the experiment whereas others will serve as a control group. The treatment group will be made especially aware of an agri-business platform by targeting them with an intensive marketing campaign, while the control group will not be exposed to the marketing campaign and just have exposure to the general publicity. The special campaign will create exogenous variation in the uptake of the business platform and can hence serve as instrument to identify the effects of uptake on business performance and welfare.
To prepare the field experiment, a small team led by Dr. Edward Asiedu (University of Ghana) conducted mid-December an explorative study. On December 12th, 2022 the research team started their journey to the Northern regions of Ghana, interviewing small businesses and farmers that are using the digital agri-business platform called “Farmerline”. The application helps agri-businesses to track customers, its sales and inventories. One shop keeper explained that for him, the main advantage of the platform is that he can see all the purchase history of his customers and call them to check on their businesses. During the dry season, however, many shops are closed as only few agricultural activities are carried out. The respondents openly shared their experiences with the platform. After five days in the field, getting to know business-owners and farmers, the team was travelling back to Accra. The collected qualitative data is an important information base for the planned field experiment. It will be implemented in regions where “Farmerline” has so far not been active.
