Assessing the role of information and communication technologies to enhance food systems in developing countries

This white paper is intended to summarize the key insights gleaned from prior work applying information and communication technologies (ICTs) in support of agriculture and food systems, identifying approaches and opportunities that hold promise for enhancing global food security, and to identify important knowledge gaps that remain, offering guidance for new work that investigates how to apply information and communication technologies in agriculture.

Following the introduction, section 2 of this white paper examines the basic state of the ICT infrastructure in the developing world, with a primary focus on the state of internet and mobile access. Section 3 provides a broad overview of recent ICT in agriculture projects. Section 4 examines research on the effectiveness of ICT for agriculture implementations. Section 5 contains the results of a field assessment of small farmers' use of mobile phones and market information services conducted by the Global Center for Food Systems Innovation researchers in Kenya in June of 2013. Based on the literature review and field assessment, section 6 outlines a set of problem definitions to help guide future work and concluding remarks are provided in section 7.