Not-so-digital platforms? Non-use, (in)appropriate technologies, and offline dimensions of digital agricultural services for smallholders in rural Africa

Digital agricultural platforms are widely promoted as transformative tools for smallholder farmers across sub-Saharan Africa. From market price alerts to bundled credit and weather forecasts, these platforms promise to modernize agriculture through scalable, low-cost digital services. Yet empirical evidence reveals a growing disconnect between these promises and the reality on-the-ground. Drawing on multi-year qualitative fieldwork in Ghana and Kenya, this paper examines why many platforms struggle to achieve meaningful engagement among smallholders. Despite high subscription numbers, actual use is limited, uneven, and often short-lived. While dominant explanations tend to attribute this to infrastructural or user deficits—such as low digital literacy, poor connectivity, or limited smartphone availability—, our findings show that disengagement more often stems from inaccurate or poorly timed advice, limited interactivity, and the use of tools that fail to align with farmers' needs. Peer networks, low-tech devices, and general-purpose channels (such as WhatsApp or phone calls) often outperform platform services in terms of relevance and trust. We argue that these shortcomings are not primarily due to infrastructural or users’ deficits, but reflect deeper limitations in the platform model itself, which prioritizes scalability and control over adaptability and farmer agency. Situating our analysis at the intersection of critical agrifood studies, data studies, and science and technology studies (STS), the paper highlights the need to attend to the power relations, human dimensions, and everyday frictions that shape digital agriculture in practice. For rural and development studies, these findings caution against treating digitalization as inherently progressive and call for closer engagement with critical data studies beyond the classic theorizations of platform capitalism in urban contexts.