Thanks, @Ali, Looking forward to your thoughts.
@Benson Since the article already went past the formal peer-review process
and got published (via Elsevier), pre-print servers may not be applicable.
It’s also an open-access (CC BY 4.0) article which should free it up for
circulation. But thanks for the idea of pre-print servers – I could use
them for some pending publications. So I am slightly less of an academic
and a little more of a practitioner. Therefore am quite keen to hear what
fellow practitioners (and policy folks) think of the findings and their
relevance (irrelevance?) – to practice and policy in Kenya.
Kind regards
On Mon, Mar 29, 2021 at 7:21 AM Ali Hussein <[email protected]> wrote:
> John
>
> Thanks for sharing. Definitely an important read. Will purpose to read
> in-depth and give you feedback.
>
> Regards
>
> *Ali Hussein*
>
> Digital Transformation
>
>
> Tel: +254 713 601113
>
> Twitter: @AliHKassim
>
> Skype: abu-jomo
>
> LinkedIn: ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim
> <ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim>
>
>
>
>
> Any information of a personal nature expressed in this email are purely
> mine and do not necessarily reflect the official positions of the
> organizations that I work with.
>
>
> On Sun, Mar 28, 2021 at 12:25 PM John Kieti via kictanet <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Dear Esteemed Listers,
>>
>> Reports by AGRA and Disrupt Africa consistently position Kenya as the
>> global leader in the number of tech ventures and digital solutions for
>> agriculture (DSAs). By GSMA’s 2020 report which tracked 713 active DSAs,
>> more than half (437) were in sub Saharan Africa. Kenya led with 95 and
>> Nigeria was at a distant second with about half of Kenya’s number. Studies
>> have questioned the ability of these DSAs to scale out so as to
>> significantly impact a sector that is the mainstay of most sub Saharan
>> African economies (including Kenya).
>>
>> My co-authors and I sought to contribute in diversifying the thinking
>> about efforts to unlock the promise of digitalisation and digital
>> transformation of agriculture in sub Saharan Africa. We conceptualised an
>> aggregator platform for digital services in agriculture (AP4DSA). This is a
>> special type of digital platform for agriculture whose characteristics can
>> partially be observed in nascent platforms such as Safaricom’s DigiFarm,
>> EcoFarmer in Zimbabwe, Bayer’s Climate FieldView, and an “imaginary
>> instance of Google play store for agriculture”. Such a platform can be
>> expected to address DSA discoverability challenges including fragmentation
>> of the digital agriculture ecosystem, absence of a one-stop-shop, and an
>> unmet desire for comprehensiveness.
>>
>> We proceeded to examine the underlying structure of value creation
>> sources in such a digital platform as perceived by likely users in Kenya.
>> We recently published our findings in the Digital Business Journal on the
>> link below (pdf downloadable)
>>
>> www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666954421000065 (see
>> also attached graphical abstract)
>>
>>
>> I take this early opportunity to invite listers’ review of our findings.
>> I am particularly wishful for feedback about the issues of value chain
>> coverage and digital inclusivity, which our research finds as sub-themes
>> of platform inclusivity, a major theme on amplifying the value of such a
>> platform.
>>
>> Kind regards.
>>
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>
