Background: Digital technologies are promoted as transformational for smallholders in Africa through the potential to enhance access to knowledge, increase productivity and food security. Despite the anticipations for agricultural digitalization in Africa, smallholders' engagement with digitalization is empirically underexplored. Hence, we surveyed 1565 rural farmers in Northern Ghana to explore how farmers interact with digital tools and services, and the variations in their engagements. Results: We found that despite the growing array of digital opportunities (with diverse tools and services available to farmers), farmers are mainly confined to simple devices (mobile phones, radio, and TV) as access to digital resources, including the internet remains limited. Meanwhile, the main sources of digitalization services for smallholders remain largely the highly subisidized, development-orieted. NGOs and private-sector projects, which generally leverage SMS, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), radio, or field agents to reach farmers. Nonetheless, participation in digitalization services remains limited, unimpressive at best, and often fades over time because of weak building blocks evident in low literacies, lack of digital competencies and the limited access to digital resources. Conclusions: Thus, full-scale digitalization remains a distant goal, and transformation claims are disconnected from smallholders' lived realities. However, opportunities exist to create a ‘digitalization for smallholders’ that is sensitive to the current and future structural limitations of smallholder agriculture, including low literacy and limited access to digital tools, to make agriculture digitalization reach its full potential in Africa.

Participation in digital services is critical for the inclusiveness of digitalization in smallholder Africa. However, farmers engagement with digitalization services needs further explorations due to limited empirical research on the topic. This paper thus employs a cross-sectional survey of 1565 farmers in Northern Ghana to assess the factors that affect the likelihood of farmers’ participation in digital agricultural services. We applied a polynomial regression model to show that gender, affiliations to farmer groups, access to extension services, ability to place phone calls, and ownership/access to mobile phones increase the probability of participation in digital services. Thus, farmer characteristics, digital competencies, and access to digital resources are critical in determining who participates in digitalization, essentially positioning these as critical factors to consider in scaling of digital agriculture services. We further argue that access and impacts of digitalization could be exclusive due to existing equities in the identified fundamental elements for participation, adoption, and use of digitalization. Hence, strategies sensitive to the drivers of engagement, including strengthening farmer associations/groups, increasing access to extension services, building digital skills, and scaling access to digital tools (including mobile phones), are required for inclusiveness, scaling and the long-term sustainability of digitalization for smallholders.

This paper adopts a document analysis to describe the expected developmental effects of agricultural digitalization in Africa and the potential drivers to the narratives that echoe such effects. Narratives show that digitalization is expected to bridge information and knowledge gaps in agriculture; promote food security; increase climate change/environmental sustainability; provide employment and empower the youth; promote gender and women empowerment; and enhance livelihood resilience in rural areas. With these findings, I argue that, though partly justifiable, private-sector led digitalization, with it’s optimistic technocratic narratives, follows, entrenches, and extends the ‘transformational rhetoric’ of the existing international development-driven African Green Revolution efforts to improve smallholder and rural lives through technological diffusion. However, without critical considerations of political-economic issues affecting its proliferation, as well as their implications on power structures and class restructuring, these narratives mask potential neoliberal incursions. Thus, issues of connectivity and the digital divide issues, the slow pace of technological adoption, scaling of digital solutions, and the weak enabling environments must be addressed to potentially make benefits inclusive. The initial suggested political-economic discussions of the narratives inject much needed critical perspectives into the early conversations by showing the potential drivers and motives of digitalization, as well as the tendencies to [among others] further concentrate power and restructure the dynamics of social classes in Africa.

The ubiquity of social and online media networks, the credulousness of online communities, coupled with limited accountability pose a risk of mis-, dis-, mal-, information (mis-dis-mal-information)—the intentional or unintentional spread of false, misleading and right information related to agri-food topics. However, agri-food mis-dis-malinformation in social media and online digital agricultural communities of practice (CoPs) remains underexplored. There is also a limited theoretical and conceptual foundation for understanding mis-dis-malinformation topics in the agri-food sectors. The study aims to review mis-dis-malinformation literature and offer a framework to help understand agri-food mis-dis-malinformation in social media and online CoPs. This paper performs a systematic review following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA). The review shows that many disciplines, particularly communication, social media studies, computer science, health studies, political science and journalism, are increasingly engaging with mis-dis-malinformation research. This systematic research generates a framework based on six thematic categories for holistically understanding and assessing agri-food mis-dis-malinformation in social and online media communities. The framework includes mis-dis-malinformation characterization, source identification, diffusion mechanisms, stakeholder impacts, detection tactics, and mis-dis-malinformation curtailment and countermeasures. The paper contributes to advancing the emerging literature on ‘controversial topics’, ‘misinformation’, and ‘information integrity’ of the virtual agri-food advisory services. This is the first attempt to systematically analyze and incorporate experience from diverse fields of mis-dis-malinformation research that will inform future scholarly works in facilitating conversations and advisory efforts in the agri-food sector.

This paper contributes to the digitalization of rural agriculture literature by proposing a social practice approach. Digitalization (practices) is conceived as an unfolding constellation of everyday farming activities manifested by practically conscious people meaningfully leveraging competences to integrate materials elements of life. Thirty-one expert key informants' interviews were conducted on experiences and pathways for the future of digital agriculture in Africa. Thematic analysis of the interviews revealed that materials (access to digital tools, enabling digital infrastructure, supporting social infrastructure), competencies (digital literacy among farmers and extension officers, IT and data education among populaces), and meanings (connecting digitization with local customs and norms and aligning digital tools with the values/perceptions of what farming is) are critical elements to establishing and embedding digital tools and services in everyday agriculture in Africa. Thus, I propose adopting a social practice approach (which focus on establishing and integrating materials, competencies, and meanings) to understanding, researching, and guiding processes of rural smallholder digitalization. The proposed approach, the first application of the social practice lens to smallholder digitalization, would allow for interventions that focus on establishing holistic and all-encompassing building blocks that bring digitalization practices to life. Specifically, the social practice proposal provides an outlook to move beyond the technologies –tools and services– of digitalization, to equally value the competencies required and meanings engendered in smallholder digital futures.