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The COVID-19 and desert locusts interlocking crises threaten smallholder farmers’ health, livelihoods, and food security in East Africa. Illustrative of what can be achieved in an open content environment, a wide array of smallholder farmer-focused digital partners and other agencies came together to deploy farmer-friendly digital tools and original content to support public health messaging, desert locust public service announcements, citizen reporting efforts and a productive recovery for f...

In 2020, East Africa experienced the dual crises of the largest desert locust invasion in decades and the global COVID-19 pandemic, both threatening farmers’ livelihoods. In response, public health and desert locust messaging was deployed via multiple digital channels to over 16 million smallholder farmers. To support the mapping and control effort, many of these channels were designed to enable farming communities to report sightings of desert locusts, turning rural communities into a large ...

 WhatsApp for Business (WA4B) API is a hugely promising platform to drive digital services for smallholder farmers. So far, the successful roll-out of solutions in the social impact space mainly revolves around user education in health, with limited, to no examples in smallholder agriculture until recently. The WA4B application adoption cycle for both organizations and end-users is nascent in agriculture, with a small number of pioneer organisations iterating, testing and preparing for scale ...