Smartphones’ Influence on Young Farmers’ Access to Extension Advisory Services in African Agribusiness: The Case of Burkina Faso and Mali

Smartphones are increasingly shaping the digital landscape of rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in Francophone West Africa, where they have become widespread despite persistent challenges related to affordability, connectivity, and digital literacy. While their potential to enhance access to agricultural knowledge and improve livelihoods is widely acknowledged, empirical evidence on how rural youth actually use smartphones to access Extension Advisory Services (EAS) and support agribusiness-related decision-making remains limited. Much of the ICT4Ag literature emphasises technological potential or pilot interventions, with less attention to everyday usage patterns, adoption constraints, and management-related outcomes from the perspective of young farmers.
This study addresses this gap by examining smartphone use among rural youth farmers in the cross-border area of Burkina Faso and Mali, where high mobile penetration contrasts with limited effective utilisation of smartphones for agricultural purposes. A concurrent triangulation mixed-methods design was adopted. Quantitative data were collected from 417 randomly selected rural youth farmers aged 18–40 using structured questionnaires, complemented by qualitative interviews with 38 purposively selected key informants, including extension agents, NGO practitioners, and agricultural leaders. Quantitative data were analysed using descriptive statistics, correlation, and regression techniques in SPSS, while qualitative data were analysed thematically using NVivo.
The findings show that although smartphone ownership among rural youth is widespread, their use for agricultural and entrepreneurial purposes remains limited. Smartphones are primarily used for communication and social networking rather than for accessing agricultural advisory or business-related applications. Key constraints include limited internet access, high data costs, language barriers, and insufficient digital literacy. Nonetheless, the study identifies the role of informal digital brokers, youth who mediate access to digital information, as emerging facilitators of smartphone-enabled advisory services in rural settings.
The study contributes to the ICT4Ag literature by providing context-specific empirical evidence from Sahelian environments and by integrating the Diffusion of Innovation theory with the Farmer Management Capacity framework. It conceptualises smartphones as enabling and complementary tools within hybrid extension systems, highlighting the institutional and contextual conditions required for their effective use in supporting rural youth and agricultural development.