Briefly describe your work with agtech and explain what motivates you to invest your time in this work.

I am interest in exploring the potential of digital agriculture innovations to transform livelihoods for farmers and consumers in the global south.  With a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa and a pilot study in Nigeria, my current  research project seeks to analyze the opportunities and challenges for scaling up digital agriculture innovations serving resource-poor farmers. The study will be guided by two interrelated objectives: (1) At national level, evaluate the enabling environment for digital agriculture innovations; (2) At enterprise level,

Briefly explain any commitments to sustainability that you or your organization bring to your work on agtech innovation. Be as specific as possible regarding what kinds of social and environmental impacts you aim to produce, and the relevant strategies you are pursuing.

My biggest motivation is improving outcomes for smallholder farmers working in developing countries

Briefly describe the way(s) in which you assess/measure social and environmental impact in your work on agtech innovation.

Three primary ways to measure impact amoung smallholder farmers: (1) increased productivity, (2) higher incomes, (3) resilience against shocks.

Our research and this workshop aim to investigate tensions between the demands/imperatives of the tech-finance industry and the demands/imperatives of social-environmental problem solving. Please comment on this problem frame in general, and in relation to specific examples from your own experience.

For this issue the specific context of the farmers is important.  Clearly there are ways that tech-finance can improve social-environmental outcomes and in some cases it can be harmful.  Alignment of goals between finance and farmers matters.  Finance is only  a catalyst that can accelerate both positive and negative outcomes.

To investigate the tensions suggested above, we rely on the concept of “mission drift”. We understand mission drift as a tendency for social and environmental impact commitments of individuals and organizations to leak out over time due to pressures and opportunities to expand revenue, valuation and capital gains. Our project aims to investigate mission drift applied to entrepreneurial ventures as well as to organizations dedicated to supporting innovation. Please comment on this thesis in general, and in relation to specific things you have experienced where possible. To the extent you find this thesis useful, what strategies can you identify to defend against mission drift?

Mission drift is hard to measure since organizations have to continuously adapt to both internal and external dynamics.  With any blended value proposition, all is good as long as there social, environmental and financial goals are aligned.  Once you have some misalignment, there is no clear way to measure tradeoffs between conflicting outcomes.

Please share something you would like to take away from the workshop.

Clearly, one can build a body of evidence on either side of this topic.  What i would like to take away from this workshop is some contextualization of the issues wherein we clearly acknowledge that outcomes might vary by farmer type and circumstance.