Farmers Demand a Fair Deal in Digital Agriculture

At dawn in Binga, in Zimbabwe’s drought-scorched Matabeleland North due to El Nino, 46-year-old farmer Sibongile Ncube peers at her simple Nokia handset, scrolling through a stream of SMS messages she no longer knows how to read—or trust.

One text from a seed company promotes a “climate-smart” maize hybrid she’s never heard of. Another, in English, warns of “severe rainfall variability,” using language that feels far removed from the dry fields and empty micro-dam outside her homestead. A third insists she register yet again for a new subsidy scheme if she wants cheaper fertilizer.

“They are always asking us for information,” she says quietly. “My name, my field size, my yields. But most of the time, nothing comes back. We don’t know who is using that information. We don’t know how it helps us.”

That uneasy gap—between data taken and value returned, between cautious hope and deep distrust—sat at the core of the 2026 Agile Data and Digital Public Infrastructure Summit held this week at the Elephant Hills Hotel in Victoria Falls.

Against the backdrop of the roaring falls and the soft clatter of laptops, one theme cut through: if Zimbabwe is to build a climate-resilient, digitally enabled agriculture sector, it must start with farmers like Sibongile—not as raw material for data pipelines, but as decision-makers who benefit directly from the systems built around them.

“No farmer, no future. No trust, no transformation.”  “We must be honest with ourselves,” said Mrs. Miranda Tabifor, UNFPA Representative, Chair of the UN Programme Management Team, and Co-Chair of the National Data for Development and Innovation in Zimbabwe, as she opened a key session on policy for agile data and digital public infrastructure.

“The question before us is not whether data and digital tools will shape the future of Zimbabwean agriculture and climate resilience. They already are. The question is whether we will shape that future deliberately and inclusively—or allow it to evolve in fragmented, inequitable, and ultimately fragile ways.”

Addressing government officials, private-sector leaders, researchers, development partners and small-holder farmers from different parts of the world, Mrs. Tabifor offered an honest assessment. “Across the continent, and here in Zimbabwe, we have seen substantial investments in digital agriculture platforms—weather apps, farmer registries, e‑voucher systems, remote-sensing dashboards,” she noted. “Yet many initiatives remain small, fragmented, and difficult to scale. The barrier is no longer just technology. It is trust.”

Farmers in the room recognized the pattern immediately, repeated registrations by different agencies; long questionnaires; promises that the data is “for development”—followed by silence.

“Too often,” Mrs. Tabifor continued, “government builds one platform, the private sector builds another, donors fund a third, and none of them talk to each other. Data is locked in silos, business models feel threatened, and farmers see duplication rather than value. What emerges is not an ‘architecture of trust,’ but an architecture of distrust.”

For farmers, that architecture is painfully tangible. It appears when an extension officer collects data and never returns with advice. It appears when a woman farmer provides detailed harvest figures, only to discover that her non-farming husband is the one approached about a loan.

“In many places, including here in Zimbabwe,” Mrs. Tabifor warned, “the experience is one sided: farmers give data, and receive little in return. When this happens, even the best-designed systems will fail the very people they are meant to serve. Good systems will fail good farmers.”

Her response is a fundamental shift she calls “Data Democracy”—a rebalancing of who holds power, and who reaps value, in the data ecosystem. “Data Democracy means that the farmer is not merely a ‘data point’ or a ‘source;’ she is a data beneficiary,” Mrs. Tabifor stressed. “Every interaction in which her data is collected should yield immediate agronomic value, market value, or risk management value.”

“In other words,” she said, “we must ensure a clear pathway from Data to Knowledge (D2K) for farmers themselves. If a farmer reports her yields or input use, that data should come back to her as something she can understand and apply within her context.

In Binga, that D2K pathway is exactly what Sibongile feels has been missing. “They asked me last year, ‘How many cattle do you have? How many bags did you harvest?’” she recalls. “I answered everything. But when I asked how this would help me, they just said, ‘It will help the government and donors to plan.’ That is good—but what about helping me to plan?”

For Mrs. Tabifor, simply adding more data and more messages is not the answer. “There is also a danger we must avoid: ‘infobesity,’” she cautioned. “More messages, more dashboards, and more alerts do not automatically translate into better decisions. Overwhelming farmers—and indeed policymakers—with non-actionable information can paralyze decision-making, rather than improve it.”

For Sibongile, whose first language is Ndebele and who shares one basic phone with her husband, these design choices are decisive. If information arrives in a language she doesn’t speak, on a device she doesn’t own, in a format she doesn’t grasp, “it might as well not exist,” she says.

Mrs. Tabifor highlighted that the digital transition is not neutral: it risks deepening existing inequalities. “We know that women in Zimbabwe, as in many countries, have less access to mobile internet, smartphones, and digital skills,” she emphasized. “If we design data systems that assume universal connectivity or literacy, we unintentionally deepen inequality.”

She posed a direct challenge to policymakers: “Do our existing and planned data systems ensure that farmers retain meaningful control over their data—and derive direct value from what they share? What specific measures are we adopting to close the digital gender gap—so that women and other smallholder farmers are equal participants and beneficiaries of data-driven services?”. Practical ideas are already being discussed:

• Subsidized rural connectivity to cut the cost barrier for low-income households.
• Targeted support for women’s digital literacy and farmer field schools enhanced with digital tools.
• Services designed for basic phones—through USSD, SMS, and voice—in local languages.
• Requirements that public–private partnerships report gender-disaggregated reach and impact.

For Sibongile and her neighbors, such changes could be decisive. “If information comes by WhatsApp, we are already out,” she says. “But if it is voice, in isiNdebele, then even my grandmother can benefit.”

“Zimbabwe can reimagine the role of the state—not as the exclusive builder of platforms, but as the designer and guarantor of Digital Public Infrastructure- the neutral ‘rails’ upon which many actors can innovate,” Mrs. Tabifor argued. She framed two central policy questions for Zimbabwean and other leaders who participated at the Summit:

1. Are current digital agriculture strategies building yet more siloed apps, or are they purposefully constructing shared, pre‑competitive rails?
2. Within those strategies, have we clearly defined an “architecture of trust”—who is liable, who audits, and who enforces?

“Without answers to these questions,” she warned, “any AI-based advisory system, e‑voucher platform, or climate data hub will operate on unstable ground. But with clear, enforceable rules of the game, Zimbabwe can unlock not just pilots, but system-wide transformation.”

Mrs. Tabifor’s third major shift spoke directly to the lived experience of climate volatility on Zimbabwean farms: moving from slow, retrospective monitoring to agile data that enables rapid, climate-adaptive policymaking.

“Traditional monitoring and evaluation approaches—large baseline surveys, midterm reviews, and endline assessments—are important,” she acknowledged. “But they are often too slow and too expensive to guide real-time decision-making. By the time we learn that a fertilizer subsidy didn’t reach the right farmers, or that a conservation practice isn’t being adopted, the season is over. We are learning after the fact.”

“For Zimbabwe, which faces recurrent droughts, cyclone risks, and shifting rainfall patterns,” Mrs. Tabifor said, “the ability to adapt policies within a season through connectivity and digital rails moving “from Compute to Capability” for AI-driven agricultural advice could be transformative.”  “AI will not create value in isolation,” she said. “It needs reliable connectivity, interoperable data systems, ethical safeguards, and human capacity.”

Mrs. Tabifor anchored these proposals within a broad human-rights and sustainable development vision. “Zimbabwe’s DPI ecosystem can be designed as an open, interoperable and human-centric system that embeds safety and inclusion at every layer,” she said, aligning it with the UN Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology’s Universal Safeguards: lawfulness, human rights due diligence, transparency, algorithmic accountability, inclusivity, and meaningful public participation. “These are not abstract aspirations; they are actionable choices,” she insisted. The potential benefits touch almost every corner of Zimbabwe’s development agenda. 

Convened by COSA and funded by the Gates Foundation and GIZ, the Agile Data and DPI Summit 2026 was the first to bring these two powerful ideas—agile data and digital public infrastructure—into one conversation, under one roof.

Over four days, innovators, policymakers, researchers, private-sector executives, civil society actors, and farmers worked in mixed groups, sketching how farmer-centred insights and interoperable digital systems could come together to drive real, lasting changes: in land preparation and planting decisions, in access to credit, in drought preparedness, in fairer, more transparent markets.

The organizers' aim was explicit, not to produce yet another polished strategy document, but to “break silos, unite diverse communities, and co-design pathways that link data collection, digital systems, and enabling policy.”

And always, at the centre of those pathways, stood the figure of the farmer. “The decisions you make now,” Mrs. Tabifor underlined, “will determine whether Zimbabwe’s digital transformation in agriculture is fragmented and fragile, or trusted, inclusive, and climate resilient.”

Back in Binga, the practical agility of data and digital public infrastructure will be measured not in conference communiqués, but in what happens the next time someone asks Sibongile for her data. Will they be able to answer the question she has learned to ask: What will I get back?

As Mrs. Tabifor put it in perhaps her most resonant line of the summit, “Let us move together, so that every byte of data, every line of code, and every digital rail laid serves the wellbeing and resilience of Zimbabwe’s people, and especially its farmers.”