A little over a year ago, I oversaw the commissioning of an inclusive digital design toolkit focused on providing practical guidance for increasing digital inclusion within food security activities.
The toolkit, and its accompanying workbook, emphasized the importance of considering the intersectional nature of individual identity and the ways different factors may result in an individual being more or less likely to access, use, and benefit from digital tools. While the toolkit is focused on food security activities, it can easily be applied to other sectors.
As I’ve utilized this toolkit in my work, I have identified three factors that help to build upon foundational digital inclusion and maximize the likelihood that digital tools will deliver offline benefit to individuals over an extended period of time. I’ve begun referring to these factors as accelerators, extenders, and amplifiers and will describe these three factors here in detail.
While many of the aspects contained within are nothing new, I find this framing to be helpful in my own thinking, and hopefully they will for you as well. These are meant to be additive to existing digital inclusion framework, whether that’s the 4 As of the gender digital divide primer, the 6 As of the aforementioned inclusive digital design toolkit, the 7 As that I proposed several years back, or any other combination of As.
Accelerators
While access to digital technology is, of course, a prerequisite to its uptake, simply offering a digital product or service (herein referred to as ‘digital tools’) that may be relevant to people is an insufficient driver of continuous usage.
With enough resources, it is relatively easy to create a digital tool for most use cases that a donor-funded food security activity may have. However, it is not enough to have a digital tool that seems relevant on paper. Sustained uptake requires more than the mere existence of a tool.
Time and again, donors have supported the uptake of digital tools that appeared to meet a need, but were under-utilized by target users. It is not simply a build it and they will come scenario. Thankfully, I have found that there are a number of factors that can help to increase the likelihood that a digital tool will be repeatedly used by users in the short to medium term.
I call these accelerators. From my experience, digital tools that address these four core factors will be more likely to see continuous usage than those that do not.
1. Accessibility
The digital tool has to be accessible to users. This includes being available on the type of device they own and the type of connectivity they have. It also means being delivered in a way that is familiar to them and their experience with digital tools.
2. Clear Benefits
It has to meet an implicit and/or explicit need and provide some sort of clear and anticipated benefit to the user. It is not enough for donors or their partners to believe it does this. Users have to feel this themselves as well.
3. Intuitive
It has to be intuitive to use. This cannot be overstated, and of course, the idea of human-centered design is nothing new. Digital tools need both form and function. If the digital tool does not have an easy to use user interface, then the user experience will be less enjoyable, which will generally impact the frequency with which users engage with it.
4. Trustworthy
The user has to be able to trust the product or service and whoever is providing it. If users don’t trust the quality of the digital tool or how their information will be used, then they are going to be less likely to want to engage with it. Trust is not a given. It has to be earned. There are also factors that can influence trust that have nothing to do with the digital tool in question.
For example, communities may have had prior negative experiences with similar types of digital tools that were introduced by donor-funded projects in the past. This is something I have heard from smallholder farmers time and again, and given how inherently risky farming is to begin with, it makes sense that farmers who have had a bad experience using a digital tool in the past might be hesitant to try something similar again.
Extenders
While all of the accelerators above will help to drive continuous usage of a digital tool in the short to medium term, they are often not necessarily sufficient to keep users engaging with a product or service over the long term. To increase the chances of long-term uptake, we need to focus on what I call extenders.
These are factors that users may not immediately recognize as important, but that, if in place, will likely contribute to sustained and satisfactory use of the digital tool over time. There are five key factors that will help to extend the usage of digital tools by users.
1. Customer Service
The digital tool needs to have appropriate and adequate customer service, including accessible complaints handling and redress mechanisms. Over time, many users will run into an issue or have a concern related to some aspect of the digital tool. If relevant customer service mechanisms are not in place, users will likely become frustrated and it can impact the trust they have in the tool, which may negatively impact how they use it.
2. Privacy, Safety, Security
A strong emphasis on privacy, safety, and security are also critical extenders. While users may not initially recognize the importance of easy to comprehend and user-centric terms and conditions or user-centric data governance approaches, over time the absence of these can also erode trust, especially if they experience directly or become aware of any security breaches or uses of their data that they do not agree with.
3. Flexibility
The flexibility of the digital tool is also something that over time will extend a positive user experience. This includes the ability to easily download your data and use it with another service (e.g. data portability) and to seamlessly connect with other tools and services you want to use (e.g. interoperability). Digital tools that lock users in and make it difficult or impossible for them to use their data to benefit from other products or services will frustrate users over time, and as soon as a more flexible alternative comes around, may struggle to retain users.
4. Responsiveness
Digital tools that are responsive to users’ needs are also most likely to gain their trust and repeated usage over the long-term. This includes having mechanisms for users to provide suggestions on how to improve the tool, as well as iteratively testing and deploying new product or service features that address evolving user demand.
5. Affordability
Finally, digital tools have to be delivered at a cost that the user can afford and the provider can sustain its delivery at. Just as affordability of digital access is an underlying factor of digital inclusion, it is also a factor in terms of extended usage, but in slightly different ways, particularly because it is not uncommon for donor-funded activities to indirectly or directly subsidize the initial cost of deploying the tool in the short-term.
As this support is temporary, digital tool providers who have viable business models that are not dependent on ongoing donor support will be more likely to provide their digital product or service over time. This doesn’t mean that users directly pay for the digital tool, but someone has to pay.
Amplifiers
Accelerators and extenders are related to factors that accelerate and extend the usage of a digital tool amongst a population segment that a donor funded activity may already be supporting.
The number of people who an activity can engage with are often just a drop in the bucket of the total number of people who could benefit from a given tool. Moreover, the individuals whose activities do engage may also benefit from other digital tools beyond the scope of the activity’s focus.
I call those factors that support the scaling of digital tools amplifiers, as they help to amplify uptake of digital tools beyond the individuals and communities that donor-funded activities directly support, as well as enable the individuals and communities that those activities do directly support to find broader benefits from the digital world.
Below are five amplifiers that can be supported directly by donor funded activities to facilitate the scale of digital tool adoption and uptake.
1. Digital Inquisitiveness
An increasing number of food security activities have begun to include digital literacy content into their capacity strengthening efforts. Digital literacy skills form the foundation of capable and safe users. These skills should continue to be supported, along with the promotion of what we refer to as a culture of digital inquisitiveness.
Oftentimes, an activity may teach digital literacy in the context of one or two digital tools that they are introducing to communities. Digital inquisitiveness goes a step further. It is focused on cultivating a desire and ability amongst individuals to use digital devices beyond the tools they have been introduced to by the activity. Digital inquisitiveness helps individuals to not only know how to use specific digital tools, but also to safely seek out and evaluate new tools, as well as to explore new features on their own.
For example, last year, I was talking to a smallholder farmer in Central America who had been using an app that a Feed the Future activity had introduced to him. He shared how he only used one feature on the app. When I asked if he ever clicked on other icons, he said no; he was afraid that he would break something. He was technically digitally literate, but he lacked a spirit of inquisitiveness to click around and explore.
2. Workforce Development
A number of countries where donors implement food security activities have insufficient qualified digitally-savvy individuals in their workforce, especially at the intersection of food security, to teach digital skills, draft and implement policies and regulations related to the digital ecosystem, and to build competitive digitally-focused companies that address the needs of smallholder farmers, agriculture SMEs, and other agriculture sector stakeholders.
By focusing on promoting digital skills within workforce development, donor-funded activities can help to amplify the number of people in a given country who are able to take on these roles, and thus, further strengthen the country’s digital ecosystem.
3. Policy & Regulation
Donors and their implementing partners can also help to amplify uptake of digital technologies for development through support of policy and regulatory levers that strengthen the digital ecosystem. This goes beyond support for foundational policies and regulations that govern general usage (such as regulations allowing mobile financial services) to include those that promote and/or encourage responsible practices, shared infrastructure, data portability and interoperability, consumer protection, inclusive data governance, and others.
4. Coordination
It is not uncommon to find fragmented digital ecosystems in many countries, including multiple actors (including government agencies, donors, civil society, and private sector) operating independently from one another on similar types of digital tools or use cases.
The development community has a long history of bringing those actors together to coordinate their efforts at a country level, and globally through convenings such as the ICTforAg conference. It is imperative for development sector actors to expand upon this work with other donors and local stakeholders by building upon such coordination.
Does This Framing Help You?
Ultimately, the journey to comprehensive digital inclusion is not a linear or copy-paste one. Each individual’s and each country’s journey will likely be somewhat different. However, by employing a combination of accelerators, extenders, and amplifiers, donors can increase the likelihood that a larger number of individuals will be able to achieve more meaningful benefit from digital technology.
- What are your thoughts on the above framing?
- Do you find this framing helpful?
- What would you change or what don’t you like?
Please share your thoughts in the comments. I would appreciate your feedback.
Note: this post was written in the author’s personal capacity and is not associated with any organization that may or may not employ him.
