WeFarm: SMS Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Network for Farmers
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WeFarm let farmers without internet ask and answer farming questions by free SMS/USSD, matching questions via NLP; it grew to …
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Digital-Literacy Training for Mahsoly App Adoption Among Smallholder Farmers
Egypt · Minya · See the Egypt profile
A randomised trial with 2,900 Egyptian smallholder farmers found classroom-based digital-literacy training raised uptake of the government's Mahsoly price-monitoring app by 20 points and farmer trust by up to 13 points, outperforming costlier 'edutainment' formats.
2900 farmers
Trial sample size
20 percentage points
Increase in app uptake (classroom training vs. control)
18 percentage points
Increase in app utilisation (classroom training vs. control)
8-13 percentage points
Increase in farmer trust in digital tools (all training variants)
Details
- Promoter
- IFPRI, Egypt's Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation, and GIZ
- Period
- 2023-2026
- Keywords
- agriculture, digital literacy, behavioural science, ICT4D
Context
Egypt's Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation, with GIZ's Egyptian-German Agriculture Innovation Project, built the Mahsoly crop-price and marketplace app; IFPRI and Wageningen University researchers ran an RCT with 2,900 smallholder farmers in Minya and Benisuef governorates (2023-2026) to test digital-literacy training formats.
Results
Standard classroom-based digital-literacy training raised app uptake by 20 percentage points and utilisation by 18 percentage points versus the control group, and all three training variants (classroom, video edutainment, live-drama edutainment) raised farmer trust in digital tools by 8-13 percentage points.
Conclusions
Low-cost classroom training matched or outperformed the more elaborate and costlier edutainment formats on several outcomes, an evidence-based finding for governments budgeting digital-literacy rollouts alongside e-agriculture platforms.
Implementation
Implementation detail (cost, timeline, staffing, conditions for success) is not yet available for this practice.
Data sources
Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.
- C-NAPSE web research — accessed 2026-07-09
- IFPRI, Egypt's Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation, and GIZ — accessed 2026-07-09
- IFPRI/CGSpace study record — accessed 2026-07-09
- Food Policy article (ScienceDirect) — accessed 2026-07-09
- IFPRI Egypt announcement — accessed 2026-07-09
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