Balancing Data Protection & AgTech Innovation: Exploring Ethical Data Sharing in the Agri-Food Sector

How confident are you that your management of African farmer data aligns with legal obligations and ethical standards?

As digital innovation in agriculture speeds ahead, numerous businesses and NGOs independently collect and manage data on farmers and their farms. Data that may be necessary to bring new and more efficient services to farmers, or to help farmers fetch premium prices for their products. As more data is collected and digitalization of the agri-food sector continues, new challenges and opportunities to use this data arise. Data can be re-used to bring more services to farmers, it can be shared to bundle service offerings and develop better advisory services.

Meanwhile, governments are responding by increasingly regulating data flows, inspired by frameworks like the EU GDPR and the new EU Data Governance Act. Recently, Ethiopia passed a new data protection bill, while the Rwandan Data Protection Office produced guidance on how to comply with its regulation on cross-border data flows. Following Rwanda, Kenya is also looking to regulate these cross-border data flows as Nigeria is cracking down on privacy violations by digital lenders. To make sure all these separate regulatory processes converge, African heads of state adopted a draft protocol this year to regulate digital trade on the continent.

At the base of all of this sits the farmer. Welcoming access to more and better quality services, but often facing multiple surveyors, extension agents and other intermediaries collecting the same data - which has to be collected regularly as gathered data quickly becomes outdated. Consent of the farmer to gather and share their data is one of the crucial pieces of this puzzle, which regulatory frameworks say has to be informed. Informed consent, that has to be gathered again each time a new service is offered or data is used for a new purpose. When farmers do not have access to smartphones, this can be a time-consuming, costly process.

The Digital Agrifood Collective aims to address this crucial balance between farmers’ data protection and AgTech innovation with a panel discussion.

The discussion will explore the inherent tensions: the value of data, ownership rights, and the costs of ensuring data protection and informed consent in intra-African as well as EU-African data flows. The goal is to find a balance where farmers' data protection is ensured ethically, and AgTech innovation can thrive through data sharing.

Key questions include:

• How can organisations comply with new regulations?
• What data is essential, and how should it be collected, assessed, and used and exchanged?
• Can businesses achieve their goals while empowering farmers and maintaining compliance?
• Who should implement governance, and how should transparency be organised?