Women Farmers Need Better Financing to Unlock AI Benefits

The gap between digital agriculture and the women who need it most is not technical—it is financial. That is the argument Shobha Shetty, a senior agricultural adviser at the World Bank and head of the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, has been making with increasing urgency as global crises compound. Women make up between 38 and 41 percent of the agricultural labor force across low- and middle-income countries, yet they remain systematically locked out of the tools—AI-powered climate advisories, pest management systems, financial planning software—that could transform their productivity and resilience. The barrier is not ignorance or lack of interest. It is money, and how money reaches them.

The timing of Shetty's warnings is sharp. Fertilizer prices have climbed because of conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. An intense El Niño weather event has stressed harvests. Overseas development assistance has contracted sharply. Meanwhile, 645 million people globally—roughly 7.8 percent of the world's population—are facing food and nutrition insecurity, with smallholder farmers and women bearing the heaviest weight. These are not separate problems. They are, as Shetty describes them, "confounded crises," each amplifying the others. The World Food Program's data makes the scale concrete: nearly half a billion people without reliable access to adequate nutrition.

What Shetty emphasizes, speaking ahead of an October event at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, is that simply counting how many women gain access to digital tools misses the point entirely. "We need to look at what we have to do to ensure that investments in digital agriculture really benefit more women, rather than just talking about how many women we reached," she said. The distinction matters because access without affordability, without control, without a voice in design, is a hollow metric. Women in poorer countries often lack the collateral—land, property, savings—that traditional lenders demand. They may receive loans as cash rather than through accounts they control, which research shows reduces their ability to manage and retain the money. The financing architecture itself has been built without them in mind.

But there are models that work. In Ethiopia, the World Bank's Africa Gender Innovation Lab tested an alternative: psychometric testing to assess creditworthiness instead of demanding physical collateral. Over three years, 89 percent of women offered loans through this method borrowed formally, compared with just 42 percent in a comparison group. The loans also proved resilient. Women who received them maintained higher business survival rates through the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent conflict in Ethiopia. In Uganda, a separate study found that women who received agricultural loans through mobile money accounts saw 15 percent higher profits than those receiving cash. The mechanism of delivery—who controls the money, how it flows—shapes the outcome as much as the amount itself.

The World Bank's GAFSP has invested nearly $2.5 billion across more than 300 projects in low-income countries since 2010, with 41 percent of beneficiaries being women. But the program has recently shifted its approach. Rather than simply expanding the number of women reached, it is now measuring whether access translates into skills, income, opportunity, and decision-making power. A project in Bangladesh illustrates the difference. Working with a local potato cooperative, GAFSP introduced women members to the FAO's RuralInvest digital tool for managing accounts and financial records. The result was not just that women could use the software; they developed an understanding of the cooperative's finances and business logic, which strengthened their position within the organization and opened new employment paths. The tool became a vehicle for empowerment, not just efficiency.

To scale this work, GAFSP has launched a new Business Investment Financing Track designed to address the gap faced by small and medium-sized agricultural enterprises. Initial investments of $14 million, in partnership with the African Development Bank, are intended to catalyze up to $200 million in private-sector lending across Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, and Zambia. A second allocation of $6 million, announced in September at the Africa Food Systems Forum in Kigali, aims to mobilize another $15 million from development and financial partners, supporting a $21 million package for smallholder farmers in Rwanda. The strategy uses grant funding to reduce risk and attract capital from both public and private sources.

Shetty frames this mobilization as necessary precisely because overseas development assistance has contracted. "In the wake of brutal cuts to overseas development assistance, leveraging private- and public-sector capital is critical to make the pie larger for everyone," she said. The challenge ahead is not whether women can benefit from digital agriculture—the evidence suggests they can, profoundly. It is whether the financial systems that govern access will be redesigned to meet them where they are, with products and delivery mechanisms that reflect their actual circumstances. Without that redesign, the tools remain out of reach, and the crises continue to fall hardest on those with the least capacity to absorb them.