Identifying Opportunities for Digitization in Agribusiness Value Chains

GSMA's Agri program aims to transform agribusiness procurement digitally.

The Challenge

The digitization of agricultural value chains presents a promising opportunity for mobile network operators to stimulate rural growth by offering tailored enterprise solutions to agribusinesses.

As part of GSMA’s Agri program, our objective was to identify and research agribusinesses with the greatest potential for digital transformation of their procurement processes.

The Work

Discovery and Assessment

Our approach centered on three primary use cases: farmer registrations, digital procurement records, and digital payments. We began with a hypotheses workshop to refine our research questions, which guided our fieldwork.

Design and Development

Through in-depth interviews with a variety of agribusinesses, we gathered data and synthesized it into actionable insights, identifying key opportunities for digital innovation.

The Outcome

The synthesis of our research findings led to an ideation session with our partners, where we collaborated to generate solutions for the identified areas. This collaborative effort resulted in a finalized set of concepts that we deemed essential for the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). These concepts included direct and digitized payments, digitized data entry, digitized weighbridge data, access to farmer profiles, pilferage reduction, and data analytics.