Digital Traceability and Quality Upgrading in the Dairy Value Chain in Kenya

Finding the right partners and places to ask questions is paramount to understanding the drivers of agricultural transformation. To facilitate opportunities for researchers and partners to develop trust and scope early-stage evaluation questions, DAISI funds small Proposal Development grants to support very preliminary, exploratory research activities, including researcher travel. This Proposal Development grant explores research themes related to information (milk quality) and access to credit under the cross-cutting theme of resource use and climate resilience.

This proposal development grant aims to explore digital traceability along the Kenyan dairy cooperative value chain as a strategy to address product quality challenges and reward upstream producers for better milk quality. The researcher will assess whether a sustainable digital milk traceability system can be developed and which prediction models would be effective in revealing individual farmers’ milk quality. This proposal development grant plans towards a randomized evaluation assessing the impact of a digital traceability system sharing milk quality information to cooperatives, bundled with input credit.