March 2021 agricultural “platforms” in a digital era

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3. EMERGING TYPES OF
AGRICULTURAL PLATFORMS 
Market opportunity has fueled the rise of many 
different types of Platforms in the agricultural 
sector. As mentioned in Section 1, the literature 
distinguishes between two overarching Platform 
types: innovation and transaction. Based on 
the orientation of the Platform, Innovation 
Platforms can be content-related (e.g., YouTube) 
or development-related (e.g., iOS or Android). 
Similarly, Transaction Platforms can vary based 
on the transaction being enabled; they can 
be product and service marketplaces, social 
and communications networks, or payment/
investment Platforms. 
In this report, we focus primarily on product 
and service marketplaces because this is 
where we have seen the most investment 
and business model innovation within 
the agricultural sector over the last 
several years. Most of these product and 
service marketplaces aim to connect smallholder 
farmers with agricultural buyers or product/
service providers so they can access a variety of 
inputs, loans, advisory services, and markets. 
By contrast, other Transaction and Innovation 
Platforms—though increasingly being leveraged 
in the agricultural sector—are not solely focused 
on agriculture. Most are existing Platforms 
that have functioned for years in other sectors 
and are now capitalizing on mobile penetration 
into rural areas. Some product and service 
marketplaces explored in this report utilize other 
communication Platforms (e.g., WhatsApp) and 
payment Platforms (e.g., mobile money providers) 
to enable the exchange of goods and services.
Note: For the remainder of this report,