State of the Evidence for Digital, Bundled Agricultural Services
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Bundled solutions may more holistically address farmers’ barriers and challenges in accessing profitable agrifood systems. Jenna Fahle, Agricultural Program Manager, explains the state of experimental evidence on digital and bundled agricultural services, and why it is important.
Despite billions invested in agricultural development programs, there are zero published randomized evaluations of an intervention that shows tangible promise for small-scale farmers: digitally enabled bundles of agricultural services. This lack of evidence influences how development funds are allocated and which programs scale.
Digital channels and bundled agricultural services offer strategic opportunities to serve small-scale farmers. Bundled approaches can simultaneously address a broader set of needs necessary for small-scale farmers to farm productively and profitably, where single-intervention programs may fail due to the presence of other barriers.1 For example, providing price information to farmers isn’t useful if they lack access to profitable markets.2 In contrast, in one study, pairing together multiple services, such as loans for improved seeds and fertilizer, convenient access to inputs, insurance, and agricultural extension raised Kenyan farmers’ maize yields by 26 percent, output by 24 percent, and profits by 18 percent.3
Complementing these bundled approaches, digital technologies offer increasingly sophisticated, low-cost channels to deliver timely and tailored information, services, and financial products to small-scale farmers and other agrifood actors. Take one example: while radio and television have long been used in agricultural extension, the widespread adoption of mobile technology in recent decades offers new potential to deliver personalized agricultural services at scale.
Despite this, there are no published randomized evaluations that test whether digitally enabled bundled agricultural services improve outcomes for small-scale farmers.4 If such services are effective, we also don’t know whether they work by helping farmers overcome multiple simultaneous constraints or by unlocking complementarities between different services. This blog explores how ongoing impact evaluations, some of which are funded by our Digital Agricultural Innovations and Services Initiative (DAISI), are beginning to fill this evidence gap.
The Landscape of Emerging (Experimental) Research
To capture emerging trends on impact evaluations for digital and bundled agricultural services, we searched the American Economic Association (AEA) Social Science Registry in April 2025 for relevant, preregistered trials, plus studies in progress or recently completed, that have not yet been published on digital and bundled agriculture.
Our search revealed a striking contrast: while our previous rapid review found zero completed, published studies, we identified twelve promising studies in the AEA Social Science registry (five of these AEA entries are funded by DAISI) that may begin to address this evidence gap.5 These twelve ongoing studies span eight countries across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Three key trends emerge from these ongoing experimental studies.
Trends in the Research Pipeline
1. Strong emphasis on bundles that deliver price or advisory information.
Emerging research will help us better understand the complementary effects of combining information, such as extension, price, or weather information, with interventions that address other farmer constraints. This is important because research shows that agricultural information alone does not consistently move farmer yields and profits. Researchers can study these complementarities by designing randomized controlled trials with multiple treatment arms that test each intervention separately and in combination.
For example, in Rwanda, a DAISI-funded evaluation is testing the impact of offering subsidized labor, conditional financial incentives, and digital delivery of personalized information on men and women farmers’ adoption of coffee tree rejuvenation practices. By varying which farmers receive which combination of these interventions, researchers will be able to assess the relative effectiveness of each incentive type on uptake and compliance with tree stumping–a high-impact but underutilized practice that is critical for climate change adaptation and improving coffee farmers’ productivity and incomes–and whether digital knowledge transfers have differential impacts when paired with financial incentives versus in-kind labor.
2. Emphasis on ‘hybrid’ offerings that combine in-person and digital elements.
While digital services rely primarily on technology platforms (like mobile apps or SMS) and analog services use traditional, in-person methods (such as extension agents and community meetings), hybrid services combine both approaches. Most emerging studies in our review would be classified as hybrid. By studying hybrid services, researchers can provide valuable insights on impacts and costs of digital versus traditional services. For example, in Zambia, a DAISI-funded evaluation is working with an existing, CGIAR-developed television-based extension program to understand how this program works together with improved access to inputs. Researchers organized input roadshows, or events where farmers can access agricultural inputs close to home, at different times during the farming season. Some program participants receive only the television extension, others get only the input roadshows, and a third group receives both services together. This design allows researchers to measure three things: how effective the television program is on its own, how input access alone affects farmers, and whether combining both services creates additional benefits beyond what each provides individually.
3. Emphasis on gender-intentional design approaches.
A number of emerging studies incorporate gender-intentional design into one or more aspects of the bundle. For example, one forthcoming study focuses on combining women’s empowerment training with digital extension. Another study focuses on digital literacy training to address what is often a barrier for women, combined with access to a digital marketing platform. Another DAISI-funded evaluation in Nepal partners with Heifer International to support community animal health workers (CAHWs), a potential career path for rural women in a context where few exist, by providing enhanced access to continuing education and digital marketing tools to improve their professional effectiveness. This study will test whether combining digital mentoring platforms with collective marketing tools can strengthen business outcomes for women-run goat cooperatives while expanding women’s roles as rural livestock entrepreneurs.
What are the takeaways?
Bundled approaches that package multiple interventions together may be necessary to help small-scale farmers overcome the varied barriers preventing them from adopting agricultural technologies. The small number of evaluations studying this approach leaves a lot to learn about which packages are most effective and why. While digital tools have enormous potential to extend information, financial access, and other services to farmers, local challenges around gender gaps, literacy, and broadband access remain barriers.
Measuring how bundled services complement each other is also methodologically challenging. Researchers must disentangle which components of a bundle drive impact and how different interventions interact with each other—work that requires complex experimental designs and large sample sizes. This complexity is particularly acute for digitally enabled bundles, which represent a growing service delivery model but lack sufficient published research to guide decision-makers.
With most of the world’s most vulnerable individuals relying on agriculture for their livelihoods, the stakes–and opportunity–for getting these interventions right couldn’t be higher. Building the evidence base for effective agricultural development is essential for both immediate farmer welfare and long-term global food security.
The evidence base for digital and bundled agricultural interventions is rapidly evolving. We invite you to be part of the conversation and subscribe to our agricultural newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn for research updates, expert analysis, and opportunities to engage.
Thanks to Misato Okamoto, former CEGA agricultural intern, for her work on the rapid review, and to Jen Burney, DAISI co-chair and Professor at Stanford, for her comments.
References
[1] An extensive literature–much of which is funded by the Agricultural Technology Adoption Initiative–reveals that there is no single binding constraint preventing farmers from adopting higher-productivity technologies. While multi-faceted programs are not a silver bullet, they may be useful approaches when tailored to the specific binding constraint(s) facing farmers in a particular context.
[2] Fafchamps, Marcel, and Bart Minten. 2012. “Impact of SMS-Based Agricultural Information on Indian Farmers.” The World Bank Economic Review 26 (3): 383–414. https://doi.org/10.1093/wber/lhr056.
[3] Deutschmann, Joshua W., Maya Duru, Kim Siegal, and Emilia Tjernström. 2024. “Relaxing Multiple Agricultural Productivity Constraints at Scale.” Journal of Development Economics 174 (November): 103409. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103409.
[4] In March and April of 2025, we conducted a rapid review of randomized evaluations in low- and middle-income countries, focusing on research published after 2010 when digital inclusion began to take off in low- and-middle income countries. Our search strategy combined systematic searches of the Web of Science, AGRIS (FAO’s International System for Agricultural Science and Technology), and manual searches of institutional repositories. We screened against a pre-determined “PICO” criteria (Population, intervention, comparison, and outcomes) using search strings adapted from Porciello 2022. In total, the rapid review considered 417 abstracts.
