Digitized data can be a key enabler in addressing multiple challenges in agriculture with benefits for different stakeholders. To meet food security in times characterized by increasing impacts of climate change on agriculture and supply chain disruptions due to geopolitical tensions, data-driven solutions are being utilized increasingly to optimize the use of inputs, increasing production and productivity and improving access to finance while reducing uncertainties and risks.

Today, however, as the focus on data for agriculture has increased, so have the challenges in the data ecosystem. For instance, there is extensive duplication in data collection, management, and analysis efforts leading to wastage of critical resources and a fragmentation of data ecosystems. Similarly, while several disjoint data pools exist, aggregation of data is constrained because of limited standardization and interoperability. From farmers’ perspective, repeated requests for data is leading to fatigue and a decreasing willingness to engage with digital agriculture service providers.

On the contrary, data-sharing, which can be defined as a scenario where two or more value chain actors share data amongst themselves under a set of binding principles and agreements, can help internalize leakages and orchestrate the agricultural data ecosystem. With this context, Intellecap and several partners organized a learning event and several expert consultations on data sharing in agriculture for smallholder farmers. This report synthesises the learnings from the event and takes a humble first step to decipher action points to promote data sharing in agriculture in a farmer-centric manner.

The report focuses on:

1. Incentives for data-sharing in agriculture;
2. Current scenario of data sharing ecosystem in agriculture;
3. Building blocks of data sharing;
4. Learnings from practical use-cases of data sharing;
5. Recommendations to scale data sharing for agriculture and smallholder farming.