Boosting Rural Agriculture in Bangladesh Through Digital Innovation
International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)
The Challenge
The Rural Microenterprise Transformation Project (RMTP) in Bangladesh aims to sustainably increase the income, food security and nutrition of marginal and small farmers and microentrepreneurs across selected value chains. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) wanted to review the project’s performance in terms of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) initiatives, assess their adequacy to address problems around rural development and generate lessons to make recommendations to enhance both project impact and sustainability.
Our Approach
- One of our partners joined multiple IFAD missions to assess ongoing ICT4D initiatives and propose new interventions to improve farmer incomes and nutrition
- Conducted desk research to identify global best practices that align with project objectives and leveraged these to provide recommendations
- We employed a mix of discussions with project beneficiaries, an assessment of connectivity, digital literacy and mobile phone ownership trends in target areas and in-depth interviews with key project stakeholders to identify potential areas of ICT interventions to support project objectives
What We Delivered
Technical and implementation recommendations for a number of ICT for Development initatiives were provided to support farmer incomes, nutrition and climate resilience. These included:
- A blockchain-based food traceability platform
- Online commerce initiatives for farmers, primarily leveraging platforms they were familiar with (e.g. Facebook)
- The development of a crowdfunding platform for rural entrepreneurs
- Partnerships with digital agricultural advisory platforms, that could also provide nutrition and climate smart advisory for farmers
- Partnerships with smart farming solution providers to deploy IoT devices for crop and livestock monitoring
The recommendations are at different stages of implementation and will be assessed by mid-2025 for their impact.