The private sector is recognizing that, as in rural markets, women will play a major role in driving global economies, and that acknowledging this trend in its early stages will give women the edge by creating path-breaking innovations. The same goes for women’s role in the agriculture sector: empowering women farmers and creating gender- focused digital solutions are the way forward. 2.3 Harnessing the power of public–private collaboration Collaboration between public and private organizations has been an effective tool in driving the scaling of infrastructure and services, affecting populations by initiating projects such as the building of roads and ports or development of financial systems. Policy support and the facilitation of business by governments coupled with private- sector innovation and investment create long- lasting, self-sustaining ecosystems. There is a strong case for fostering public–private collaboration (PPC) to scale agritech. Although agritech services have been growing swiftly, scale-up is still limited in emerging economies, and smallholders are affected the most by sector challenges. Ecosystem impediments, such as the lack of availability of high-quality and usable data, lack of technical understanding or knowledge of agriculture in start-ups, the high cost of educating and onboarding individual farmers – especially smallholders – and the fact that agritech is usually delivered as a point solution rather than as a holistic package focused on the entire value chain have all slowed agritech’s growth, hampering it from reaching its full potential. In PPCs, governments can play a critical enabling role without acting as the procurer. Procuring agritech services and then delivering them to farmers alone will not help build a sustainable agritech market. The need here is for government incentives – financial and non-financial – that will encourage the private sector to invest in scaling agritech in value chains or geographical regions. Such incentives might include: improving the availability of data through a data exchange; initiating an agritech sandbox (held in agriculture universities) to co-create, test and validate agritech solutions; and the availability of on-the-ground channels, such as self-help groups, cooperatives, government agri extension workers and/or banking agents to onboard farmers. Each government can identify the incentives based on the agritech ecosystem within its individual jurisdiction. Policy support and the facilitation of business by governments coupled with private-sector innovation and investment create long-lasting, self-sustaining ecosystems. Agritech: Shaping Agriculture in Emerging Economies, Today and Tomorrow 19

Agritech 2024