Rapid Inclusivity Assessment for Digital Agriculture Services
Gender-inclusive digital design assessment
The Rapid Inclusivity Assessment for Digital Agriculture Services is a practical tool that helps researchers, NGOs, and developers evaluate how inclusive their digital agriculture innovations are, with a focus on gender equality. It is useful because many digital solutions unintentionally exclude women and marginalized farmers due to barriers such as limited literacy, smartphone access, or internet costs.
Through a short workshop, teams use three fictional proto-personas and an experience map to analyze how different users might engage with their service, identify potential exclusion risks, and generate ideas for more inclusive design. The tool is best applied during the early design or prototyping phase, before large-scale investments, ensuring that digital agriculture services are equitable and accessible from the start.
The tool guides teams through a structured reflection on potential risks of exclusion among illiterate, poor, remote, or otherwise digitally excluded users, and supports them in identifying design improvements that make the service more inclusive.
In what context is this tool useful?
This tool is useful in digital agriculture projects targeting smallholder farmers in low-income settings. Expected outcomes are more inclusive, gender-aware digital services. Main users include researchers, NGOs, and development teams designing or adapting agricultural digital tools.
Results achieved or expected
An example comes from Guatemala, where the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT applied the tool in 2022 to adapt the Diet Quality Questionnaire (DQQ)—originally developed in Rwanda by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA)—for rural communities. The assessment revealed that many users had limited trust in Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems and preferred more familiar communication channels.
As a result, the team decided to expand the use of WhatsApp to collect dietary data and improve engagement.
These adaptations strengthened the DQQ’s inclusivity for rural women and marginalized farmers, demonstrating how the Rapid Inclusivity Assessment can effectively guide context-specific, gender-aware digital design and support more inclusive digital agriculture services.
Variations, scaling and adaptations
The Rapid Inclusivity Assessment tool is easily adaptable and scalable across different regions, languages, and agricultural contexts.
Researchers can tailor the proto-personas to reflect local realities—such as literacy levels, cultural norms, or access to mobile technology—and adjust the experience map to match the specific digital service being developed.
Because the tool is available in editable formats (PowerPoint, Excel, PNG) under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0), it can be freely reused, localized, and translated. It can also be applied beyond agriculture—for example, in health, education, or climate information services—to assess gender inclusion in digital design. Its simplicity and workshop-based format make it suitable for small teams and early-stage innovation projects, enabling wider adoption and iterative improvement across diverse digital development initiatives.
Contact Person
Anna Muller
Scientist, Team Lead Inclusive Design and User ResearchTools often used together with this tool
Designing gender-inclusive digital solutions for agricultural development:
An introductory guide and toolkit
The User Research Toolkit
A resource for innovation researchers and their partners to learn and engage with User Research methods – methodologies to create inclusive products that understand and enable people of all backgrounds and abilities.
