Farmbetter: 3-in-1 Digital Advisory Platform

Smart farming support—anytime, anywhere.

farmbetter gives governments a ready-to-use digital system to improve agricultural extension services and reach more farmers with better advice. Farmers receive simple, climate-smart farming tips through a WhatsApp chatbot in their own language. Extension officers use a mobile app to manage farmer records, share recommendations, and report visits. Ministries and district offices use a dashboard to monitor activities, adoption rates, and geographic coverage in real time.

This system reduces pressure on overstretched extension services, standardizes the quality of advisory content, and provides real-time field data for planning and reporting. Already deployed in 9 countries, farmbetter can be embedded within national digital agriculture strategies or public extension programs. Governments typically fund the license and training through existing programs or partnerships, while the platform delivers measurable outcomes on productivity, inclusion, and climate resilience.

This technology is pre-validated.

9•8

Scaling readiness: idea maturity 9/9; level of use 8/9

Adults 18 and over: Positive high

Adult farmers, regardless of education level or farm size, gain timely and relevant agronomic advice. This helps smallholder men and women in both rural and peri-urban areas increase productivity, improve income stability, and reduce vulnerability to seasonal shocks.

Others: Positive high

Farmers in geographically isolated areas gain timely agronomic guidance without needing to travel to extension offices. This reduces information gaps between rural and urban farmers and strengthens local food production systems. The platform can be adapted to provide information in simple language or local languages, and through formats that reduce dependence on high literacy, ensuring inclusion of users who may otherwise be excluded from written technical materials.

The poor: Positive high

Farmers with limited financial capacity benefit from low-cost, accessible advisory services that optimize input use, reduce production risks, and improve return on investment. The impact is particularly significant in remote areas where access to formal extension or markets is limited.

Under 18: Positive high

Children and youth benefit indirectly when their households adopt improved farming practices. Better yields and income improve access to nutritious food, school attendance, and educational performance. The effect is strongest for rural youth from low-income households where farming is the primary livelihood.

Women: Positive high

Women farmers—often managing smaller plots or engaging in home gardens—gain equal access to quality agricultural information. The technology addresses barriers such as limited mobility, lower access to extension services, and fewer financial resources, enabling women to improve yields, income, and household food security.

Climate adaptability: Highly adaptable

The platform provides climate-smart recommendations tailored to local agroecological zones, benefiting farmers in diverse settings—from drought-prone rural areas to high-rainfall zones—regardless of farm size or resource level.

Farmer climate change readiness: Significant improvement

Advisory services improve readiness for climate shocks by offering location-specific, seasonal guidance. The benefits are greatest for smallholders in vulnerable regions with limited access to formal climate information systems.

Biodiversity: Positive impact on biodiversity

Promotes diversified cropping systems and integrated pest management. The impact is stronger in mixed-farming households where biodiversity also supports nutrition and resilience.

Environmental health: Greatly improves environmental health

Promotes safe and efficient input use, reducing chemical runoff and soil degradation. This benefits farmers in both high-density peri-urban zones (reducing water contamination) and rural catchment areas.

Soil quality: Improves soil health and fertility

Encourages organic matter restoration, crop rotation, and reduced tillage. These practices are especially impactful for small-scale farmers on degraded soils with limited access to synthetic fertilizers.

Water use: Much less water used

Disseminates water-saving irrigation and moisture-retention practices. The benefits are particularly significant for farmers in water-scarce zones and for women who often bear responsibility for water collection and management.

Problem

Extension Agents Cannot Meet Demand:
Most public extension systems operate with limited staff and transport capacity. One agent may serve 5,000 farmers, leaving many without regular support.
No Digital System for Tracking Advisory Delivery:
Ministries lack real-time tools to monitor who received advice, what was recommended, and whether it was adopted. This weakens program oversight and transparency.
Disconnect Between Policy and Practice:
National strategies often promote climate-smart agriculture, but without effective field-level support, adoption remains low and fragmented.
Limited Farmer Visibility Slows Decision-Making:
Agricultural planning relies on partial or outdated data. Governments cannot easily identify regional gaps, monitor uptake, or measure results across districts.
Gender and Youth Are Not Adequately Reached:
Women and young farmers are often underserved by traditional extension systems. Many advisory programs do not collect or disaggregate data by gender or age, making inclusion goals difficult to implement and track.
Lack of Systems to Align with SDGs:
Ministries are under pressure to demonstrate progress on SDGs. Without reliable field data or scalable outreach tools, reporting and accountability are limited.

Solution

farmbetter strengthens public extension systems by giving agents a mobile tool to support more farmers with climate-smart practices.
WhatsApp chatbot ensures farmers receive timely, tailored advice, using location and crop data to adapt messages to their reality.
Dashboards provide ministries and districts with live data, helping track coverage, adoption, and field activities at national and subnational levels.
The platform helps reach underserved groups, with tools to monitor gender and youth inclusion.
Supports SDG-linked reporting, climate adaptation targets, and national digital agriculture strategies.
Proven in Kenya and other countries, with potential to integrate into national systems with limited infrastructure requirements.

Key points to design your project

The farmbetter 3-in-1 digital platform is a low-cost, scalable solution for governments to deliver climate-smart advisory services at scale. It offers a WhatsApp chatbot for farmers, an offline-capable Android app for extension agents, and an online dashboard for monitoring and planning. This integrated approach strengthens extension systems, empowers farmers with timely advice, and ensures real-time data on performance.

To integrate farmbetter successfully into your extension program, here is what to plan for:

Assess advisory needs and priority areas: Identify regions or value chains where farmers lack support or extension coverage is limited.
Secure a license and budget accordingly: Purchase a Software-as-a-Service license based on your target user base. Include costs for localization, setup, and yearly renewal.
Customize content to your context: Tailor over 1,700 validated climate-smart practices to local crops, environments, and languages with your extension experts.
Train lead staff and agents: Conduct Training-of-Trainers for extension managers, followed by training for frontline agents to help farmers register, receive advice, and adopt practices.
Accommodate connectivity realities:
- WhatsApp chatbot: requires minimal data—accessible on basic phones.
- Agent app: works offline in the field; syncs when back online.
- Dashboard: requires reliable internet at district or national level.
Drive farmer onboarding and awareness: Use demonstrations, community meetings, and local campaigns to encourage farmer uptake.
Use the dashboard to monitor inclusion and performance: Track reach by gender, youth, and location to ensure equitable and effective outreach.
Use data and feedback to improve: Regularly review adoption trends and feedback to refine content and delivery methods.
Align with policy goals and SDG tracking: Leverage the platform to support national targets on food security, gender equity, climate resilience, and use dashboard data for reporting.
Plan for long-term use: Set aside budget for license renewals, training refreshers, and content updates to sustain impact.

Real-World Examples of farmbetter in Action

AgriPath research program: farmbetter is the central tool in a five-year, five-country project testing digital, hybrid, and traditional advisory models in Burkina Faso, Uganda, Tanzania, India, and Nepal. The program targets around 50,000 smallholder farmers and 250 extension agents, with a strong emphasis on gender inclusion.
Northern Uganda outreach: Kilimo Trust used local radio broadcasts to promote farmbetter and drive uptake among rural farmers, highlighting the combination of digital and local engagement strategies.
Colombia & Ecuador pilot: In collaboration with SWISSAID’s AeD-LABs, farmbetter supported approximately 800 farmers in sharing agroecological innovations and accessing sustainable land management advice tailored to their contexts.
WoodyWeeds+ in Kenya: farmbetter helped deliver best practices for managing the invasive Prosopis tree directly to affected land users as part of Kenya’s National Prosopis Strategy.

Cost vs. revenue

Data reliability of this estimate: 100 %

Return on investment 242 %

Every USD invested returns USD 2.42 net income.

Detailed financial information ›

IP

Provisional application, Copyright, Trademark

Scaling Readiness describes how complete a technology’s development is and its ability to be scaled. It produces a score that measures a technology’s readiness along two axes: the level of maturity of the idea itself, and the level to which the technology has been used so far.

Each axis goes from 0 to 9 where 9 is the “ready-to-scale” status. For each technology profile in the e-catalogs we have documented the scaling readiness status from evidence given by the technology providers. The e-catalogs only showcase technologies for which the scaling readiness score is at least 8 for maturity of the idea and 7 for the level of use.

The graph below represents visually the scaling readiness status for this technology, you can see the label of each level by hovering your mouse cursor on the number.

Scaling readiness score of this technology

Maturity of the idea 9 out of 9

Uncontrolled environment: validated

Level of use 8 out of 9

Used by some intended users, in the real world

Maturity of the idea										Level of use
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9

Cost of the investment Sum of all fixed and operational expenses.	USD 8,830 per year per organisation
Gross revenue Sum of all income before subtracting costs.	USD 21,383 per year per organisation
Net income Gross revenue minus total cost.	USD 12,553 per year per organisation
Return on investment Percentage of income earned for each dollar invested, calculated as: (income ÷ cost of investment) × 100	242 % per year per organisation

References:

Temmplate_Cost, Revenue and ROI calculation for TAAT technologies_choice-sheet_LOCKED.pdf (PDF, 62.1 KB)

Countries with a green colour: Tested & adopted
Countries with a bright green colour: Adopted
Countries with a yellow colour: Tested
Countries with a blue colour: Testing ongoing

Countries where the technology is being tested or has been tested and adopted
Country	Testing ongoing	Tested	Adopted
Kenya	–No ongoing testing	–Not tested	Adopted
Tanzania	–No ongoing testing	–Not tested	Adopted
Uganda	–No ongoing testing	–Not tested	Adopted

This technology can be used in the colored agro-ecological zones. Any zones shown in white are not suitable for this technology.

Agro-ecological zones where this technology can be used
AEZ	Subtropic - warm	Subtropic - cool	Tropic - warm	Tropic - cool
Arid
Semiarid
Subhumid
Humid

Source: HarvestChoice/IFPRI 2009

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals that are applicable to this technology.

Goal 1: no poverty

Increases farm profitability through better yields and reduced input waste, raising household incomes for smallholder farmers.

Goal 2: zero hunger

Improves food availability and stability by enabling farmers to produce more and better-quality crops.

Goal 3: good health and well-being

Promotes the production of diverse, nutritious foods and reduces harmful chemical exposure through safe input-use recommendations.

Goal 5: gender equality

Ensures women farmers have equal access to agronomic knowledge, improving their decision-making power and income potential.

Goal 8: decent work and economic growth

Strengthens rural economies by increasing agricultural productivity and creating opportunities for value chain engagement.

Goal 12: responsible production and consumption

Encourages resource-efficient farming practices, reducing waste and improving input-use efficiency.

Goal 13: climate action

Disseminates climate-smart agricultural practices that improve resilience to climate variability and reduce vulnerability to extreme events.

Goal 15: life on land

Promotes biodiversity-friendly practices, soil conservation, and sustainable land management.

1. Acquire the Technology (License and Setup)

Organizations contact FarmBetter Ltd. to purchase a SaaS license tailored to the number of farmers or agents they plan to support (e.g., cooperatives, NGOs, governments). The setup includes negotiation for language customization and content localization.

2. Customize and Localize the Platform

The system is configured using over 1,700 peer-reviewed sustainable agriculture practices from databases like WOCAT. Content is translated and adapted to local languages, crops, soils, and climate zones.

3. Train Trainers and Field Agents

A Training‑of‑Trainers session is conducted where master trainers, extension agents, or cooperative staff are taught to use the mobile app and WhatsApp chatbot, and register farmers. Trained agents then roll out training to local staff.

4. Onboard Farmers via WhatsApp

Farmers either self-register or are registered by agents via WhatsApp. The chatbot prompts a short survey on farm location, crops, goals, and challenges, then delivers customized advice tailored to the farm situation.

5. Use the Extension Agent App in the Field

Agents use the farmbetter Android app to manage farmer profiles, track adoption of recommended practices, plan follow-ups, and sync data when internet is available—also works offline.

6. Monitor Performance via Dashboard

Project managers and organizations access a web-based dashboard to track farmer engagement, practice adoption, agent activity, and inclusion metrics such as gender or age. This supports data-driven decision-making and M&E reporting.

7. Iterate Based on Feedback and Scale Up

Implementation partners review dashboard data and farmer feedback to refine content, adapt language or delivery mode, and expand reach. Advanced features like AI-based chatbot automation are gradually introduced.

8. Maintain and Sustain the System

License renewals and refresher training ensure continuity. Updated practices and features (including offline support and voice messages) are pushed periodically to all users to maintain relevance.