Social Agriculture in Kenya: A Literature Review

Social agriculture is a set of practices that support agricultural livelihoods including information exchange, support mechanisms, and markets—that are based on the use of social media platforms, particularly in countries with a high proportion of their workforce in agriculture. It includes agricultural information exchange, agricultural support mechanisms, and agricultural markets.

Part of a broad research project on social agriculture, this literature review identifies the extent to which social agriculture has been documented in the literature; positions the definition and research within the literature by drawing upon literature from relevant, intersecting, and complementary fields, including smallholder agriculture, digital agriculture, social media, and social commerce; and explores the affordances granted by social media for the pursuit of agricultural livelihoods and the ways in which these are being applied by rural agriculturalists.

Key findings include:

• Social platforms are widely known, familiar, free to use, and have a broad range of functionalities that enhance adoption by agriculturalists. Social platforms offer a richer user experience, broader networking capacities, and higher level of interactivity than most purpose-built digital agriculture platforms.
• Agricultural buying and selling patterns have been increasingly moving towards social platforms, far outpacing the level of activity on existing digital agriculture marketplaces.
• Social agriculture broadly reflects existing digital divides and gendered accessibility constraints; users are more likely to be younger, wealthier, more male, and more highly educated than the general population.