Publication database

Commendable progress has been made across many parts of Africa over the past years to increase agricultural productivity, reduce hunger, malnutrition, and poverty, create new employment opportunities for young people and improve the livelihoods of rural communities. Yet, demographic change, urbanization, shifting diets and climatic changes mean that pressure is growing on food systems to make more food and more varied and nutritious food available and accessible.  How African countries position themselves to harness and deploy digital technologies will determine the future competitiveness of African agriculture and its contribution to African economies.

The current report — Byte by byte: policy innovation for transforming Africa’s food system with digital technologies— summarizes the key findings of a systematic analysis of what seven African countries at the forefront of progress on digitalization of the agriculture sector have done right. It analyzes which institutional and policy innovations were implemented and which actions by the private sector and agtech start-ups were taken to increase the development and use of digital tools and services in the agriculture value chain. The objective of this report is to identify interventions that work and benefit farmers and other actors in the value chain and recommend options for policy and program innovation that allow countries to develop a digitalization ecosystem in which digital technologies and services can be developed and used to foster growth and competitiveness in Africa’s agriculture value chains. 

This white paper seeks to articulate the impacts of connectivity and propose a framework of financial, social and economic key performance indicators for the last-mile connectivity (LMC) sector, in order to ultimately drive investments in the sector. The purpose of the framework is to illuminate impact pathways that link investments in LMC enterprises to positive development outcomes.

For over a decade, mobile money has been driving financial inclusion, opening access to digital transactions and giving people the tools to better manage their financial lives. This publication delves further into this topic and addresses the following key questions: How should the mobile money business model evolve to meet the changing needs of individuals and small businesses, and what is required to make this shift? Who will benefit from the ‘payments as a platform’ approach?

This report addresses the opportunity for the private sector to play a role in developing digital payment systems. It highlights various sectors where these opportunities are largely untapped and where global companies can leverage their networks to help bring consumers into the digital economy.

This toolbox has been developed for readers among donors, policy makers and the agribusiness who have already understood the importance of ICT for agriculture in general and for contract farming in particular. The document gives an overview of ICT related tools and their possible fields of application in contract farming. It shows their long-term financial benefits and gives advice for the selection and prioritization of suitable tools depending on the specific criteria of a given contract scheme, such as its size, business type, geographical setting and the type of production. 

Fintech in Africa is evolving quickly. Today, there are hundreds of fintech startups across the continent – but how has the sector changed in recent years? This report takes a look at the next generation of fintech in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This document aims to inform and empower those who may have limited technical experience as they navigate an emerging ML/AI landscape in developing countries. Donors, implementers, and other development partners should expect to come away with a basic grasp of common ML techniques and the problems ML is uniquely well-suited to solve. We will also explore some of the ways in which ML/AI may fail or be ill-suited for deployment in developing-country contexts. Awareness of these risks, and acknowledgement of our role in perpetuating or minimizing them, will help us work together to protect against harmful outcomes and ensure that AI and ML are contributing to a fair, equitable, and empowering future.

This primer aims to equip international development agencies and partners to assess whether and how distributed ledger technology (DLT), such as blockchain, might apply to their work. This primer cannot do justice to the complexity of DLT and its technological underpinnings, philosophical origins, and diverse business models. Instead, it provides:

• a set of key questions to consider for assessing relevance of DLT to particular development challenges;
• a basic summary of the technical aspects of DLT; and
• an illustrative list of DLT applications being tested across a range of sectors.

Meeting the mobile money needs of the unbanked in emerging markets is a vast opportunity. However, firms seeking to tap the mobile money opportunity are faced with a landscape of unknowns. How will the mobile money value chain work in practice? What do we know about consumer behavior? To answer some of these questions, and understand how digital payments providers can capture the opportunities while benefiting those without access to financial services, this report looks at the actual financial data of a sample of mobile money providers, all on a blinded basis. 

P2P business models like Airbnb or Uber provide an organised way to collectively share certain resources. Could similar solutions reduce the barriers to sharing of the limited existing sanitation facilities in low income countries? During 2016 and 2017 Inclusive Business Sweden and Aqua for All, supported by Unilever and funded by Transform, carried out a project named ‘Peer-to-peer Business Models to Meet Sanitation Needs’ to explore this possibility.