Connecting rural areas: An indispensable condition to generate income, foster rural retention and tackle climate change in Central America
By: Manuel Otero
Director General of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA)
A pioneer in the field of development economics, Nobel laureate Michael Kremer often cites four areas as key to driving prosperity and eradicating poverty: education, health, access to drinking water and agriculture.
Kremer, a professor at the University of Chicago and IICA Goodwill Ambassador for Sustainable Development Issues, who is internationally renowned for his contributions to alleviating global poverty, prioritizes agriculture due to its key role in generating income and fostering well-being in rural areas. This is especially important for family farmers, who are always at a risk of falling behind due to their lack of access to knowledge and technologies.
In addition to education and health, digital agriculture, too, can offer effective and rapid solutions that allow for transferring knowledge, incorporating it into daily tasks and generating benefits that trigger virtuous growth processes. Specifically, it has the potential to make available to low-income farmers key tools such as useful information on weather for crop management, on soil health, and on ways to improve specific agricultural practices, among other data.
These types of information services are of vital importance for the weakest link in the agriculture sector. They empower farmers and enable them to increase their yields and income; foster rural retention and generational succession in rural areas, which, in turn, prevents mass migration; and make farmers key players in the fight against climate change.
To enable farmers to reach their full potential, it is crucial to foster connectivity, bridge gaps between urban and rural areas, as well as improve access to the Internet and communication services through technology, placing special emphasis on women and youth.
A number of limitations are slowing down the agricultural digitalization process. Some are more obvious, such as obstacles with respect to infrastructure and the availability of devices. Others are more subtle, such as the lack of awareness of the economic opportunities afforded by these resources and the deficient use of digital technologies.
According to a 2022 study by IICA, the World Bank, Bayer, CAF, Microsoft and Syngenta, approximately 72 million rural dwellers in 26 Latin American and Caribbean countries lack access to connectivity services with the minimum quality standards.
Despite the progress achieved since 2020, Central America is not only one of the most climate-vulnerable regions in the world, but also one of the regions with the greatest internal disparities with respect to significant rural connectivity. This indicator measures regular Internet use, access to appropriate devices, sufficient data availability and connection speed.
According to 2022 data by the World Bank and UNDP, 74% of urban households in Central America have fixed Internet connections, compared to 42% of rural households.
This is a difference of 32 percentage points, compared to the average urban-rural gap of 28 percentage points in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to data by IICA, the World Bank, Bayer, CAF, Microsoft and Syngenta.
In 2020, connectivity levels varied greatly among Central American countries: while Costa Rica and Panama had high levels of connectivity, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua comprised the low connectivity cluster.
In 2022, in the aftermath of the pandemic, progress achieved with respect to connectivity transformed this scenario in El Salvador and Honduras. The former country moved up from the low connectivity cluster to the medium-level cluster. The latter country, in turn, saw access expand by almost 13% thanks to policies implemented to foster connectivity among vulnerable households and specific public and private sector plans aimed at improving access to rural connectivity through differentiated rates for mobile phone services.
Despite these changes and relative improvements, three countries (Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua) remain at a disadvantage. Tracking changes with respect to the status of rural connectivity allows for demonstrating that much remains to be done in this area.
Thanks to the proactive role assumed by international cooperation and public-private partnerships, public policies were implemented to address the emergency situation triggered by the pandemic. Within this scenario, Central America faces the added challenge of expanding its connectivity levels, for which it will need to intensify efforts to foster investment programs and digitalization ecosystems for agriculture.
This is an urgent agenda, especially for regions such as the Dry Corridor, where close to 30 million people suffer from social issues such as mass migration and the impact of climate change, and where agriculture employs 42 percent of the population. In that region, 1 out of every 3 people have access to just one meal a day, due to a confluence of factors, including inadequate natural resources management, high unemployment rates and low levels of schooling .
Incorporating and expanding the use of digital technologies in daily activities will further improve living conditions for women, youth and the rural population as a whole, which are key to food security and environmental sustainability; and will also contribute to boosting agricultural development and preventing environmental risks.
