Digital Agricultural Management Systems and FISP Performance in Zambia 2017-2024
Keywords:
Digital agriculture, FISP, Zambia, agricultural management systems, performance evaluationAbstract
The delivery, traceability and accountability of public agricultural support programmes are also being improved through the use of digital agricultural management systems. The paper will assume the correlation between the digitization of the district level and production by the Farmer Input Support Programme (FISP) in Zambia in the period between 2017 and 2024. It has been analyzed using the provided dataset of districts by year, which has 110 districts, 9 regions, 8 years and 880 observations. Aggregation on an annual basis, regional analysis, quartiles of technology-intensity and correlation analysis were implemented to measure the change in programme delivery, beneficiary integrity, adoption and cost indicators. The findings demonstrate tremendous administrative changes in the course of time: the average input efficiency rose to 87.44% in 2024 compared to 66.71% in 2017, whereas targeting accuracy grew to 93.67% in 2024, as opposed to 72.92% in 2017. The technology coverage has also increased by 20.00 percent to 86.28 percent, the digital coverage by small farmers has risen to 35.61 percent to 88.38 percent, the duplicate detections have fallen by 45,062 to 9,205, and the cases of fraud have also fallen by 2,086 to 328 within the same period. The administrative cost per registered farmer has decreased by 4.51 to 2.30, while the digital investments per registered farmer have increased by 0.45 to 2.51. The regional analysis has shown that the general performance in terms of delivery and cost was better in Lusaka and Southern provinces as compared to the Western, Luapula, and Northwest provinces. The increase in yield on its part was quite stable, though, which implies that digitization strengthened programme governance more obviously than agronomic output. The article concludes that there was a high correlation between digital management systems and the enhanced targeting, less leakage, widespread adoption, and less administrative costs of the unit, but the degree to which those gains can be transformed into production outcomes remains conditional on agronomy, access to markets, and rural infrastructure.
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