April 21, 2026
DIGITAL AGRICULTURE IN CRISIS: PLATFORMS, PROMISES AND REALITIES
Why do so many digital agricultural platforms launch, yet so few survive?
The global push for innovation-led development has turned digital agriculture into a flagship model for food security, yet a striking gap remains between the hype and the reality. While AI-driven solutions are currently amplifying expectations, the empirical evidence is sobering: more than half of the digital agriculture apps launched in Sub-Saharan Africa become inactive within just three years, with only a handful reaching 1 million registered users mark.
These failures are rarely just technical. They expose deep structural mismatches between platform design, user needs, and the funding models that sustain digital ecosystems. As the industry pivots toward AI, we must ask: are we witnessing a truly transformative shift, or simply the entrenchment of familiar development contradictions under a new technological paradigm?
We invite researchers and practitioners to submit to this Special Issue of Information Technology for Development. We invite interdisciplinary contributions – theoretical, empirical, and methodological – that analyse the political, economic, and socio-technical conditions shaping the trajectories of digital platform interventions across Global South contexts. Rather than assuming digitalisation as an inherently scalable pathway to development, the Special Issue seeks scholarship that interrogates processes of experimentation, adaptation, resistance, and failure, and that advances critical perspectives on platformisation, agrarian change, and digital development within contemporary rural transformation.
Read the full Call for Papers and submission guidelines here!