Participatory development of mobile agricultural advisory driven by behavioral determinants of adoption

Mobile applications have the potential to revolutionize agricultural advisories, providing farmers with real-time information and insights for improved decision-making. Agricultural advisories are aimed at improved adoption of best management practices, which include water management techniques. Hence, adoption of mobile applications, and consequently advisories and water management practices have implications on the human-water dynamics in agriculture. 

However, the adoption of such apps is influenced by various behavioral factors, necessitating a participatory approach of development with the stakeholders. This study describes the steps taken towards co-designing a mobile agricultural advisory app through iterative feedback and training sessions with farmers. The objectives of this study include the determination of factors influencing mobile advisory adoption via a farmer survey, and using this knowledge as a basis for iteratively developing the app over a period of around one year, via multiple in-person and remote feedback sessions with technologically progressive farmer stakeholders. The co-developed mobile application is called Makara (https://solidaridad.makarainit.com/), which was initially promoted as a predictive model based application that integrates climate and price movements and allows farmers to reduce their financial risk to ensure sustainable livelihoods. 

The Theory of Change approach of Contzen et al. (2023), a successor of the Risk-Attitude-Norms-Abilities-Self-Regulation (RANAS) model (Mosler, 2012) was used to develop a digital survey to determine major socio-economic and behavioral factors driving and hindering agricultural mobile advisory adoption. Linear regression models based on data collected from 1200 farmers conducted in Maharashtra (India) during April-May 2023 were used to determine these significant factors. Using this as a basis, multiple in-person and online feedback sessions were undertaken with farmers from the same region (from March 2023 to January 2024), iteratively working on developing different features of the Makara app.

The surveys on behavioral determinants emphasized the influence of norms, trust, abilities, and attitudes in app. adoption. The app's development process was enriched by participatory design, integrating features such as multi-lingual support, intercropping and multi-cropping options, and multi-component budgeting. Frontend features were also transformed to enhance user-friendliness and incorporate redundancy (e.g., text and audio-visual communication) in communicating the application outputs. Overall, the app is now promoted as a farmer's assistant for on-farm accounting and for suggesting best practice recommendations rather than a tool to explicitly estimate the risk to their yields, incomes and profits, which are now more ancillary features.

The conclusion underscores the success of the participatory development approach, incorporating farmer feedback into the app's design. The study contributes to the evolving landscape of agricultural technology by demonstrating the complementarity of behavioral approaches to technology adoption and participatory development of mobile agricultural advisories.