Title : How do institutional arrangements around digital services facilitate the use of agricultural technologies for farmers in Northern Benin?
Abstract:
Institutional arrangements facilitate farmers’ technologies usage in agriculture. How those involved in digital services achieve this remains the main question that we answer in this paper. We adopted the Technology Acceptance Model proposed by Davis et al. as our theoretical framework Participant observation facilitated the collection of qualitative data, while structured interviews enabled the collection of quantitative data from 110 farmers in localities in Northern Benin where the institutional arrangements emphasized in this paper are implemented. Structural equation models were mainly used to analyze the data. The results show that farmers initially had physical access to agricultural technologies thanks to institutional arrangements around digital services. These arrangements then facilitated cognitive access to these technologies which led farmers to perceive them more as being easy to use. This perception, associated with farmers' ability to innovate and their perception of the usefulness of these technologies, positively influences their use. This paper contributes original insights by examining novel institutional arrangements in agriculture and underscores the necessity of integrating innovation capacity into technology acceptance models.
Audience Takeaways:
This presentation will provide to the audience, interesting knowledge to help farmers in the use of agricultural technologies. First, it will allow the audience to understand the importance of digital technologies in the dissemination of agricultural technologies. It will also allow the audience to realize the need to establish institutional arrangements around digital services that empower local communities. These arrangements allow farmers to have material and cognitive access to agricultural technologies, which allows them to use them more easily. Finally, this presentation will allow to understand that it is very important to take into account the capacity of farmers to innovate in the use of technologies. To this end, stakeholders in the agricultural world must no longer just disseminate technologies but also develop initiatives to strengthen farmers' capacity to innovate, in order to facilitate their use.
