Addressing Food Security with Digital Public Infrastructure
By Christine Kim & Tim Wood
Overview
Food security plays a pivotal role in alleviating poverty, enhancing public health, and fostering socio-economic stability. Yet in recent years, the convergence of multiple crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, armed conflicts, and escalating climate emergencies, has significantly hindered agricultural productivity and led to a dire state of food insecurity that has been disproportionately felt among the most vulnerable populations worldwide. To effectively tackle this challenge, it is not enough to focus on immediate-term recovery efforts; rather, laying the foundations for longer-term resilience will enable countries to withstand future crises. Digital public infrastructure (DPI) - society-wide, digital capabilities that are essential to participation in society and markets as a citizen, entrepreneur, and consumer - is proving to be a powerful tool in the fight against food insecurity, now and in the future.
Current Approaches
Currently, food insecurity is directly or indirectly addressed through social protection programmes utilised by countries and aid agencies. For example:
Cash Transfer Programmes. There is considerable evidence supporting the effectiveness of cash transfers in mitigating malnutrition. A randomised control trial in India involving 2,400 women with children under age two showed unconditional cash transfers resulting in higher caloric intake and better diet diversity for both mother and child. In Bangladesh, when the World Food Programme (WFP) provided cash transfers in advance of flooding, the cash was largely spent on food, and as a result households were 36% less likely to go a day without eating if they had received the transfer compared to households that did not. Across Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Uganda, payments for ecosystem services (PES) recipients were able to convert around 40% of their land into environmentally friendly land use over four years, leading to reduced deforestation and food insecurity.
Food Distribution Programmes. In-kind or highly-subsidised distribution of food to vulnerable households is another commonly used method of combating food insecurity. Responding to the war in Ukraine, unrest in Haiti, climate disasters across the US, and - at tragic cost - the conflict in Gaza, World Central Kitchen has provided more than 350 million hot meals to people impacted by devastation. In 2022, the WFP assisted over 160 million people, including 20 million schoolchildren with nutrition. In the United States, food subsidy programmes focused on pregnant or postnatal women improved intake of targeted foods or nutrients by 10–20%.
Agriculture Programmes. Distribution of agricultural inputs (e.g. fertiliser, farming equipment), access to finance (e.g. insurance, credit), and go-to-market support are among the interventions that have been especially popular in increasing food output in countries that have a high proportion of smallholder and subsistence farmers. In the Philippines, the Department of Agriculture spearheaded an initiative to provide 2.2 million bags of additional fertiliser to rice farmers across the country. In Mexico, an impact evaluation of the CADENA programme showed that weather insurance increased farmers’ resources to invest in the subsequent planting season after a weather shock, expanded the cultivated area after the shock, and enhanced household consumption.
With increasing penetration of mobile technologies, these programmes often leverage digital solutions (e.g. digital payment schemes, digital food registries, mobile data collection platforms) to more effectively reach intended recipients. While such digitisation has helped achieve some immediate results, it can result in bespoke solutions that create siloes, duplicate effort, and foster fragmentation across programmes.
Intersection with DPI: an Infrastructure Approach
Digital public infrastructure (DPI) inherently steps away from building bespoke solutions for a single use case, and instead designs and deploys reusable digital building blocks that can be mixed-and-matched to enable multiple use cases, across multiple sectors. As such, DPI is able to address the fundamental use cases for food security (and beyond) with greater scale, effectiveness, inclusion, and impact.
By unbundling programmes’ entire digital stacks down to foundational, reusable, and extensible building blocks, an infrastructure approach helps food security programmes, as well as broader social protection efforts, to more effectively bring about longer-term improvements and opportunity for households and individuals. Specifically:
Cash Transfer Programmes built on Digital Payments Infrastructure. Several countries have taken digital ID, account mappers, payment switches, and other building blocks to create inclusive and flexible digital payments infrastructure that are already being leveraged for multiple use cases. By investing in DPI, these countries have made it easier for food security-focused cash transfer programmes to reach people. In Brazil, Pix allows banks, businesses, government agencies, and individuals to instantly send and receive money. Launched during the COVID-19 pandemic, the government also leveraged Pix for its Auxílio Emergencial programme, which disbursed funds to 70 million Brazilians - 40% of whom did not have an account before the pandemic (direct source: senior economist at Brazil Central Bank). And today, 152 million Brazilians, or over 70% of the adult population, can make payments among themselves and to over 14 million companies to buy groceries, pay bills, and receive social assistance. In place of a single programme digitised in-silo, Pix itself can be used for various cash transfer programme needs.
Food Distribution Programmes built on Digital ID and Registries Infrastructure. Digital ID and registries are among the many building blocks being combined for multiple subsidy programmes, including food distribution. In India, any individual from eligible households can go to any Fair Price Shop, use their Aadhaar ID to biometrically authenticate against one or more subsidy registries, and pick up their household’s monthly wheat, rice, sugar, and fuel allotments. This food distribution programme utilises existing digital infrastructure to great success: almost 70% of recipients use Aadhaar as their means of authentication, and every month approximately 94% of disburseable subsidies are taken up by eligible recipients. Such DPI, in conjunction with strong governance, could help ameliorate the challenges of fraud and theft facing several food distribution programmes today.
Agriculture Programmes built on Digital Credentialing and Data Exchange Infrastructure. Digitally-verifiable credentials (e.g. business licences, land ownership), farmer profiles, and crop data registries can combine with data exchange infrastructure to enable access to finance, markets, agricultural inputs, and other critical public and private services. For example, Ethiopia is exploring the creation of an “Agri Stack” by linking the FAYDA ID to existing farmer profiles and other related databases; such data exchange infrastructure can facilitate efficient and effective transactions amongst market players (e.g. a private bank can digitally verify a farmer’s identity and her business licence before providing a loan).
As a recent IMF white paper summarises well, “the key idea behind DPI is not digitalisation of specific public services, but rather building minimal digital building blocks that can be used modularly…to enable society-wide transformation.”
Opportunities for impact in the next 12-24 months
In the next 12-24 months, we have an opportunity to positively impact the lives of hundreds of millions of people. The following tangible opportunities present a path for exponential impact.
Taking an infrastructure approach to building and deploying food security interventions will unlock sectors-spanning impact. There is clear country demand for DPI, with over 80 countries currently investing in digital payment infrastructure, digital ID, and/or data exchange systems. There is also a clear opportunity for food security use cases to be at the forefront of demonstrating the impact of country DPI investments, with benefits accruing to both food security programmes and national-scale infrastructure development.
Co-Develop will support food security efforts through:
Government-to-Person (G2P) payments. Working with and through appropriate partners, we aim to support countries that have expressed an interest in DPI and G2P payments to help accelerate their existing social protection work. Over 60 countries are currently investing in digital payment systems, and we aim to identify which have payments-based food security programmes that could be connected to national-level digital payments infrastructure for increased scale, efficiency, and flexibility. For example, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, the Philippines, and Malawi currently have cash-transfer programmes for food security supported by the WFP and are pursuing digital payment benefit transfers.
Other Infrastructure (Digital ID, Registries, Credentials, Data Exchange). Co-Develop and its partners will support countries that are interested in connecting existing digital ID, registry, and other relevant DPI layers to food security objectives. For example, Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Agriculture is working with the Ministry of Technology to deploy a farmer registry with specific food security and climate change adaptation use cases in mind. Additionally, the Commonwealth Secretariat of the UK is working with key Commonwealth countries, including Bangladesh, Barbados, Ghana, and Malawi, to develop ways to connect existing agriculture-related registries via data exchange.
Strengthening Digital Public Goods. Some existing digital public good software tools, such as OpenSPP, are actively engaging with countries to deploy their platform for food security and climate change use cases. Co-Develop is exploring providing funding to accelerate deployment of these DPGs and to add new functionality where required. There are also opportunities to bring new digital public good software tools into the ecosystem. For example, many food security programmes currently rely on siloed, bespoke digital solutions. We see opportunities to help organisations a) assess to what extent their solutions have been built on foundational building blocks that can be extracted as more generally-applicable DPI that could be reused by other programmes; and b) evolve the solutions themselves to operate as part of a greater DPI technical architecture and become digital public goods that can rapidly be adopted..
Our team welcomes ideas, feedback, and engagement from partners to co-develop potential ways to apply digital public infrastructure to food security challenges. Please reach out at info@codevelop.fund - we would love to hear from you.