Page 101 - The Digital Financial Services (DFS) Ecosystem

ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services
Ecosystem

5.3 Agriculture

Key Findings

• We find agricultural connections in Nigeria (monitoring subsidies) and Thailand (delivery of extension
services).
• ID links to agriculture may be limited by lack of connectivity in rural areas, requiring significant offline
infrastructure to synchronize with centralized systems.National ID programs are not well-linked to
agricultural functions according the evidence we review. Among the 43 countries, only Nigeria and
Thailand are identified as having functional agricultural applications. Nigeria’s program linkages promote
more efficient delivery of subsidies, while Thailand’s focus on delivering targeted extension services.
Scarce agricultural applications may be attributable to several challenges. First, we find that ten ID programs
have faced challenges enrolling rural residents (Table 4), suggesting barriers to national identity systems may
be higher amongst rural populations (more likely to engage in agriculture). These challenges stem from the
geographic remoteness of rural populations and poor road infrastructure that makes access difficult for mobile
registration teams. In addition, nine ID programs cited high initial fees to obtaining an ID card as a barrier to
the poor, with specific impact on rural areas. Difficulty enrolling poor and rural populations, likely including
many farmers, may have an impact on desires to link ID programs to agricultural functions. Without strong
coverage among farmers, separate registration and card issuance efforts would need to be undertaken to
ensure an agricultural ID link could function across the target population.

A second challenge revolves around connectivity. Though increasing, cellular network coverage varies widely
in developing nations, with low-coverage and “dead zone” areas still common in isolated areas (Food and
Agriculture Organization, 2013). Yet, the primary agricultural uses for IDs that we came across in the literature
are reliant on having intermittent to continuous access to a mobile network or the internet in order to provide
their intended benefits:

• Nigeria: Digitally monitoring delivery—and receipt—of subsidies in order to optimize efficiency (see
below case study in Table 7).

• Thailand: Digital delivery of extension services based on remote monitoring of farmer practices and crops
via satellite (see below case study in Table 7).

• India (potential use): Monitoring supply and demand of grain subsidies, and using the information to
better inform farmers, and manage grain storage and distribution (Zelazny, 2012).

Each of these programs benefits from connectivity between the end user and officials administering and
monitoring the program. In areas without connectivity, concerted efforts are required to build infrastructure
that can operate offline and intermittently synchronize to central databases. Thailand’s government delivers
digital extension services through its network of community ICT centers, and Nigeria utilizes tablets that can
process subsidy transactions offline at point of sale (Boonoon, 2013; Grossman & Tarzai, 2014).

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