Scaling trusted SMS services to thousands of smallholder farmers

Transforming basic SMS into structured farmer services

We worked with farming cooperatives and corporate partners to turn their fragmented outreach into real SMS services that could support both the cooperative and its farmers. Many organisations had very little structured data about their farmers, yet were responsible for reaching tens of thousands of people spread across hard‑to‑access rural areas.

Our focus became to treat SMS like a digital service rather than one‑off messages: farmers could subscribe to specific services, receive timely, relevant information, and respond; organisations could collect data and manage ongoing relationships, not just send occasional blasts.

Building a platform and flows that farmers would trust

To make these services operable, we designed a SaaS platform that automated SMS sequencing, sign‑ups, and data collection so a small team could run multiple services and reach thousands of farmers without manual messaging. But SMS in Kenya was also associated with scams and spam, so asking farmers to sign up to a new short code was not straightforward – even when it represented their own cooperative.

I led a research project with a team of Kenyan researchers, combining phone interviews with 32 farmers and experiments on different invitation patterns. We found that farmers were most likely to sign up when encouraged by someone they already trusted, moderately likely when sign‑up promised immediate, useful information, and very unlikely to respond to unexpected, anonymous SMS. These insights directly shaped how we designed the sign‑up flows, short‑code framing, and service invitations in the platform, so SMS services felt safer, clearer, and more worthwhile to engage with.

SMS services as real farm support

By turning SMS from ad hoc messaging into managed, subscription-based services, we enabled cooperatives, NGOs, and research partners to stay in regular contact with thousands of dispersed farmers using only a small technical team. Instead of relying on slow, expensive field visits that reached each farm only occasionally, they could configure and run multiple services in parallel and see how farmers were engaging through simple survey responses.

A dedicated research project with Kenyan farmers helped us identify more effective, trust-building sign-up patterns. This made it easier for farmers to subscribe via short codes and start receiving services that felt relevant to their daily work, such as irrigation advice, COVID safety guidance, factory updates, and payment or training notifications.

For farmers, this meant timely, actionable information that previously depended on the next field visit. They now knew when to irrigate, when PPE would be available, when factories were accepting coffee, and when support or training was on offer, allowing them to manage their farms more efficiently and make better use of scarce resources.