Beyond the Tech-Hype About Smart Sensors
Lessons from Kenya's "Silicon Savannah" about the need for governance of digital agriculture.
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Kenya’s “Silicon Savannah” is often celebrated as a model for Africa’s digital future. But as digital technologies spread rapidly across farming systems, attention must shift from focusing on technologies alone to the institutional and governance conditions under which digital agriculture can effectively serve smallholder farmers.
Around the world, governments, development agencies, and private investors are pouring billions into digital agriculture. According to the 2025 AgFunder Global Agrifoodtech Investment Report, investments reached US$16 billion in 2024. In Africa, there are high hopes that digitalization can help smallholder farmers address constraints in accessing extension services, agricultural inputs, financial services, and timely market information. Yet while much attention often focuses on technological innovation itself, it is becoming increasingly clear that the broader social and institutional systems surrounding technology matter just as much. As digital technologies spread across food systems, the debate is shifting from whether agriculture should digitalize to how digitalization can be made effective, inclusive, and sustainable.
Kenya’s “Silicon Savannah” is often celebrated as a model for Africa’s digital future due to its relatively advanced mobile infrastructure and a vibrant innovation ecosystem - among others, Kenya pioneered the use of mobile money service M-Pesa. It has also emerged as one of Africa’s leading digital agriculture hubs, making it a particularly interesting case to explore institutional and governance conditions under which digital agriculture can effectively serve smallholder farmers. Drawing on both a broader analysis of Kenya’s digital agriculture ecosystem and a case study of pioneering digital soil-testing services offered to Kenyan coffee farmers, this article explores how not technologies alone but governance arrangements, intermediary service systems, and trust shape the real-world impacts of digital agriculture.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and International Telecommunication Union (ITU) indicate that the country hosts more than 100 organizations providing digital agriculture solutions, ranging from private technology companies and start-ups to public institutions and development organizations. Well known examples include DigiFarm, which combines extension advice with financial, input, and market services; iCow, which supports farmers through digital extension and farm record-keeping features; and Hello Tractor, a digital platform that connects farmers with tractor hiring services. This growth of digital tools has been supported by strong political commitment to digitalization, including investments in ICT (Information and Communications Technology) infrastructure, the establishment of a dedicated ICT ministry, and governance frameworks. Combined with strong interest from donors, researchers, and private investors, these conditions have positioned Kenya as an important testing ground for digital agriculture in Africa.
The country’s digital agriculture landscape is highly diverse, as a recent stocktaking on digital tools revealed (see also Figure) (Njuguna et al. 2025). So far, most digital tools support farmers with generic services and information such as weather forecasts, market updates, or extension advice. These generic tools provide basically the same information to all users, making them easy and cheap to scale.
More recently, a new wave of tools emerged that are designed to provide more tailored, farm-specific services and information. This becomes possible by combining data entered by farmers or collected via sensors and satellite imagery with algorithm-based diagnostics. For example, SmartCow, a livestock management platform, helps farmers monitor animal health and productivity through manually entered farm data. And AgroCares Scanner, a sensor-based soil-testing technology, aims to generate tailored fertilizer recommendations based on actual soil needs. These technologies are increasingly promoted as a way to deliver more precise and efficient agricultural support, particularly in regions where public extension systems remain overstretched. Yet despite the rapid expansion of digital agriculture initiatives across Kenya and Africa more broadly, rigorous evidence on their long-term effectiveness, sustainability, and governance implications remains relatively limited.
Fertile ground for service providers
Many of the more sophisticated digital agriculture technologies remain financially and technically out of reach for individual smallholder farmers. As a result, intermediary-based service models involving cooperatives, extension agents, and private service providers are becoming increasingly important in connecting farmers to digital systems. A recent study on a digital soil-testing tool in Kenya highlights these dynamics (Njuguna et al. 2026). The technology uses portable sensor-based devices to test soil samples directly on farms and generate fertilizer recommendations through a software-based advisory system. A wide range of service providers including agro-input dealers, small and medium enterprises, NGOs, farmer cooperatives, and public extension officers within county governments are involved. They collect and test soil samples directly on farms while also capturing field-level information such as GPS coordinates. The service providers access the system through annual software licenses and help farmers interpret recommendations and identify appropriate fertilizer applications.
The study highlights that digital agriculture tools can create meaningful forms of knowledge exchange and awareness when embedded within supportive institutional arrangements. In the case study, digital services introduced some farmers to formal soil diagnostics for the first time, with around 20 percent of surveyed farmers reporting that they had never tested their soils before. The technologies also appeared to strengthen awareness around soil health issues such as soil acidity and liming. Importantly, these outcomes were often strongest where digital tools were complemented by trusted intermediaries such as cooperatives, extension agents, and service providers who helped interpret recommendations and contextualize them within local farming realities. Rather than replacing existing advisory systems, the findings suggest that digital agriculture tools may be most effective when integrated into broader networks of institutional support and farmer learning.
Challenges for inclusion of smallholder farmers
Nonetheless, the study also revealed a range of challenges affecting digital agriculture in smallholder farming contexts. One of the key challenges is finding viable financial models in markets for smallholder farmers in the long term. While donor-supported partnerships involving development agencies, financial institutions, and government programs helped expand access to this technology in the first place, sustaining long-term use proved more difficult once commercial license fees to access the digital tool software were introduced by the developers to recoup their costs. In some cases, tools that had initially been acquired through donor-supported initiatives became underutilized or were returned altogether, with 43 percent of the acquired devices either returned or remaining owned but unused.
The case study also revealed the importance of factors not related to the technology itself, but social factors that determine how it is used. For example, the quality of recommendations depended not only on the quality of the field device itself but also on how data was collected and entered by intermediary service providers. Inconsistencies in field-level data capture, including arbitrary target yield estimates and GPS coordinates recorded away from farms, influenced recommendation outputs in ways that farmers could not independently assess or verify.
The effectiveness of the tool also depended on how farmers understood, trusted, and integrated recommendations into their everyday decision-making. While 85 percent of farmers received digital soil test reports, only 18 percent retained them for future reference. In several cases, farmers reverted to familiar public extension recommendations of 44 kg nitrogen per acre rather than apply the substantially higher nitrogen fertilizer rates generated through digital diagnostics. These decisions reflected not only financial and household resource considerations, but also broader questions of trust in relatively new and unfamiliar advisory systems.
For many farmers, independently verifying how digital recommendations were generated remained difficult, particularly where underlying analytical processes and validation mechanisms were not transparent or easily accessible. Although collaboration with public extension systems was evident in some cases, questions around independent validation and accountability continued to shape farmer perceptions and trust in digital advisory services.
These experiences suggest that the future of digital agriculture in Africa will depend less on the rapid spread of technologies alone and more on the institutional systems surrounding them. As governments, development agencies, and private actors continue investing in digital agriculture, greater attention will be needed around accountability, long-term sustainability of service and business models, and oversight of increasingly data-driven advisory systems. The Kenyan case study showed that farmers often had limited ability to independently verify how digital recommendations were generated, particularly where recommendation outputs depended not only on proprietary digital systems, but also on the quality of field-level data captured by intermediary service providers. This raises broader questions around algorithmic opacity, service quality assurance, and responsibility within digitally mediated agricultural advisory systems. Just as conventional soil-testing laboratories operate under quality assurance and accreditation systems, similar discussions may become increasingly important for digital agricultural advisory technologies.
At the same time, greater investment in the training, certification, and possible licensing of intermediary service providers may help strengthen accountability and competence in digital advisory delivery. Farmers also require both digital and non-digital skills to critically interpret and use increasingly data-driven recommendations. Particularly where advisory systems remain complex and difficult to independently verify. Strengthening collaboration with public extension services and supporting locally grounded advisory structures may therefore become just as important as technological innovation itself. As digital agriculture systems continue to expand across Africa, ensuring that digital advisory services remain transparent, context-sensitive, and accountable to farmers will be critical to building long-term trust and meaningful agricultural impact.
Quality control for digital advice services
Kenya’s experience shows that digital agriculture is not simply a technological transition, but also an institutional one. While digital tools hold considerable potential to improve access to agricultural information, diagnostics, and advisory services, their effectiveness ultimately depends on the governance systems through which they are introduced, interpreted, financed, and used. As digital agriculture continues to expand across Africa, the central challenge may no longer be whether agriculture should digitalize, but how digital systems can be designed and governed in ways that are transparent, accountable, and responsive to the realities of smallholder farming. For governments, development agencies, researchers, and private innovators alike, this may require moving beyond a narrow focus on technological scaling toward greater investment in trust-building, institutional coordination, service quality, and long-term sustainability. The future of digital agriculture in Africa will likely depend not only on smarter technologies, but also on stronger and more inclusive systems surrounding them.
Dr. Evelyne Njuguna – Researcher, Division of Social and Institutional Change in Agricultural Development, University of Hohenheim, Germany
Prof. Thomas Daum – Associate Professor, School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
References
This article draws on research conducted as part of the doctoral thesis “Governance of Digital Tools for Sustainable Agriculture: Case Studies from Kenya (2025)” by Evelyne Njuguna, University of Hohenheim, Germany.
Njuguna, E., Birner, R., Daum, T., & Mburu, J. (2026). Smart sensors, fragile trust: Governance of digital soil-testing tools in smallholder agriculture in Kenya. Agricultural Systems, 236, 104771.
Njuguna, E., Daum, T., Birner, R., & Mburu, J. (2025). Silicon Savannah and smallholder farming: How can digitalization contribute to sustainable agricultural transformation in Africa?Agricultural Systems, 222, 104180.
