New Paper of Dr. Ayobami Adetoyinbo: Digital innovations and institutional barriers in agricultural input subsidy programmes in sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from Nigeria
This paper assesses how digital innovations are integrated into agricultural input subsidy programmes in sub-Saharan Africa and the challenges this entails. It shows that ICT-based subsidies can improve recipient targeting, reduce leakage and corruption, and raise efficiency, but their impact is constrained by weak institutional arrangements, policy inconsistendy, poor information flow and reporting, and moral hazards like "round-tripping", input diversion, and elite capture. The authors argue that realising the full benefits of digitalisation requires addressing deeper structural problems, escpecially governance problems, vested interests, and the systematic exclusion of marginalised recipients.
https://doi.org/10.1111/dpr.70057