By Rhys Manners, Gracie Rosenbach, and David Spielman
Last month, Dr. Rhys Manners, a data scientist from the Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) spoke at IFPRI Rwanda’s inaugural webinar titled “Data-driven approaches to program targeting for agricultural transformation: Evidence on farmer typologies and innovation scaling in Rwanda.” The webinar, chaired by Dr. Jean-Chrysostome Ngabitsinze, the Honorable Minister of State for Agriculture and Animal Resources, outlined the potential for farm typologies to improve targeting and innovation scaling of new technologies, inputs, and services for smallholder farmers in Rwanda.
Dr. Manners presented a real-world application in which farmer typologies were developed and tested through research collaboration between the Consortium for Improving Agricultural Livelihoods in Central Africa (CIALCA), the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), and One Acre Fund in Rwanda. The collaboration aimed to better understand the diversity of farmers and farming systems in Rwanda, and to tailor products and services to the needs of different farmer-types. Results—highlighted in Hammond et al. 2020, an openly accessible article in the refereed journal Agricultural Systems—demonstrate the power of data-driven approaches in recognizing the considerable heterogeneity among Rwandan farmers, and leveraging this heterogeneity to advance the country’s agricultural transformation strategy.
Their study drew on nearly 3,000 interviews from 17 districts to identify 10 different farm typologies in Rwanda. Dr. Manners discussed how each farm category is placed along two distinct axes to identify the characteristics of those farmers. The first axis captures a measure of prosperity—a set of indicators that are commonly used in many other studies on farm and farmer typologies. The main characteristics that distinguish farms along the prosperity axis are land area cultivated and livestock owned. The second axis captures the adoption of inputs, namely fertilizers and improved crop varieties, with the main differentiating factors among farmers along this axis (in other words, some main factors that are associated with farmer using inputs) are perceptions of input efficacy, access to training, and education level.
Figure 1. Farmer typologies plotted on the two axes and how the groups are distributed across Rwanda
Source: Hammond et al. 2020
Following a rigorous validation process of the typologies, a simple decision support tool was developed to easily categorize farmers into these typologies based on only four questions. This simplicity can be leveraged for a wide range of applications in program and policy implementation.
Dr. Manners’ presentation kicked off a lively round of comments from webinar panel members drawn from the public, private, and non-profit sectors. Dr. Charles Bucagu, Deputy Director General of Agriculture Research and Technology Transfer at the Rwanda Agriculture and Animal Resources Board (RAB) highlighted one of Rwanda’s greatest challenges in agricultural policy targeting: the highly complex farming systems of Rwanda which necessitate the use of data-driven typologies.
Mr. Jean Claude Munyangabo, Managing Director of BK TecHouse, weighed in on the topic with a discussion of their ongoing collaboration with RAB to digitize the input subsidy and distribution program through the Smart Nkunganire System (SNS). He noted the benefits of using farmer typologies to improve program and system targeting.
Finally, fellow CGIAR colleague Dr. Elke Vandamme, a food systems agronomist and country representative for the International Potato Center (CIP) in Rwanda echoed these discussion points. She noted that “Farm typologies are one [of many] tools that we can use to embrace diversity across locations and among farmers to make recommendations and services more impactful and adopted by farmers”.
Dr. Manners and the discussants fielded questions from the webinar audience on multiple topics, including methodological, technical, and practical issues. Concluding remarks noted the considerable scope for expanding work on data-driven farmer typologies and targeting to accelerate the transformation of smallholder agriculture in Rwanda.
The Honorable State Minister concluded the session by giving all panelists and audience members and important charge: to continue to think critically about the challenges that the agriculture sector is experiencing while encouraging a greater uptake of the research and policy analysis recommendations provided by the CGIAR and other key research and academic organizations in the country.
Photo credit: Rhys Manners/IITA
About the Authors:
Rhys Manners is a data scientist with IITA Rwanda
Gracie Rosenbach is the country program manager of the IFPRI Rwanda Strategy Support Program.
David J Spielman is the program leader of the IFPRI Rwanda Strategy Support Program.
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