Designing for relevance
Food systems are complex because they sit at the centre of livelihoods, markets, climate, health, land, infrastructure, and trust. A farmer registry is not just a database. A seed verification tool is not just an SMS code. A crop map is not just a geospatial product. Each one is part of a wider system of incentives, behaviour, institutions, and accountability.
IDI brings a life-centred innovation lens to this complexity. We begin with lived realities, then design the structures that help institutions act on what is true.
We ask:
- ➔ How do farmers become visible without being overburdened?
- ➔ How do verification systems protect farmers instead of shifting risk onto them?
- ➔ How do public and private actors share data without creating extraction or duplication?
- ➔ How do innovations scale when the underlying system is fragmented?
- ➔ How do food systems become more resilient before a crisis becomes visible?
Shifts towards the future we’re building
True transformation requires shifting from legacy models to unified systems.
What We Work On
We focus on building shared foundations, tracing inputs, and scaling high-impact tools.
Shared data infrastructure
We support the design of shared infrastructure that makes farmer, farm, production, transaction, and ecosystem signals more visible and useful. The goal is to move from fragmented datasets and one-off registration exercises to living systems that support planning, financing, advisory, market coordination, and innovation.
Farmer registry & continuous intelligence
We help define how farmer and farm records can be strengthened, updated, and connected to production realities over time. This includes foundational farmer data, farm-use data, production updates, field actor contribution models, and governance rules for keeping records current and trusted.
Agricultural data coordination
Where national or partner-led initiatives are building agricultural data systems, IDI supports coordination, adoption design, institutional alignment, and translation into usable decision pathways. This includes work around geospatial data backbones, crop monitoring, field boundaries, yield forecasting, and downstream adoption by government, insurers, advisory systems, and innovators.
Verification, traceability & trust
We design verification pathways that protect farmers, strengthen enforcement, and rebuild trust in the system. This includes moving beyond literacy-dependent scratch-code systems toward multi-channel verification, WhatsApp reporting, inspector verification, product traceability, complaint routing, hotspot detection, and visible follow-through.
Innovation challenge pathways
We help convert systemic food-system bottlenecks into challenge statements that innovators can build around. Rather than supporting isolated agritech pilots, we frame challenges around shared infrastructure, interoperability, traceability, production intelligence, aggregation, advisory, and market coordination.
Research & insights
We maintain a live evidence function that tracks food-system developments, identifies reference models, produces briefs and scans, surfaces policy and financing opportunities, and keeps the practice adaptive as new questions emerge.
A holistic approach to food systems innovation
Our work moves across three interconnected pillars.
Learn
We uncover what is happening across the food system
We uncover what is happening across the food system and what decisions the evidence must serve.
- Ecosystem and value-chain mapping
- Farmer, farm, and production diagnostics
- Field research and behavioural insight
- Policy, market, and partner intelligence
Create
We translate evidence into usable systems
We translate evidence into systems, services, and infrastructure that can be used.
- Food systems data architecture
- Farmer registry and update models
- Verification and reporting pathways
- Interoperability and standards
Empower
We sustain, adopt and improve systems
We help institutions, partners, and field actors adopt, sustain, and improve the systems.
- Partner coordination and convening
- Capacity building for extension and field actors
- Prototyping feedback and update loops
- Ecosystem activation and challenge pathways
Principles
How we approach structural transitions across food ecosystems.
Design from the last mile
We start where systems usually fail: the farmer, agro-dealer, extension worker, cooperative, chief, field officer, trader, or local institution trying to make decisions under pressure.
Make the system legible
A food system cannot be coordinated if it cannot see itself. We design ways for farmer activity, production changes, field reports, market signals, and risk patterns to become visible in trusted and usable ways.
Build trust into the infrastructure
Trust cannot be added later through messaging. It must be designed into identity, verification, consent, governance, data stewardship, institutional roles, and follow-through.
Strengthen what exists
We do not begin by replacing existing systems. We map what is already there, identify what is missing, and design improvements that connect, validate, and make existing infrastructure more useful.
Turn insight into action
The work does not end with research. Every insight must point to a decision, a design move, a programme, a tool, a policy choice, or a partner action.
Current Priorities
Focus initiatives making direct, tangible impacts today.
ADAPT-Africa coordination & adoption support
IDI’s near-term role is to support coordination and institutional usefulness around the ongoing ADAPT-Africa agricultural data backbone initiative. The initiative is led by Microsoft AI for Good Lab and NASA Harvest, with partners working toward open, standardized, validated, and nationally owned agricultural data layers for Kenya. IDI’s contribution is to help align partners, clarify adoption pathways, support policy and institutional embedding, and translate technical data products into practical use cases for government, private sector, innovators, and development partners.
Food-system verification & counterfeit-input reporting
IDI is beginning to shape a new opportunity around seed and input verification. Field research shows that scratch-code verification often fails because it assumes literacy, confidence, and active farmer verification. It also shows that counterfeit networks are outcompeting formal markets through better last-mile reach, retailer incentives, and weak enforcement visibility. The emerging opportunity is to design a trusted, multi-channel verification and reporting layer that can work through WhatsApp, USSD, IVR, dealer-assisted verification, photo evidence, geotagged complaints, inspector verification, and risk-based enforcement routing.
Farmer registry & ACILITY scoping
IDI will begin light scoping with ACILITY around the farmer registry and shared food-systems data infrastructure agenda. This includes clarifying what a minimum viable farmer/farm data layer could look like, what continuous production updates may require, and where ACILITY can contribute to architecture, data stewardship, and implementation pathways.
Meet our project team
A diverse group of seasoned professionals dedicated to guiding our strategic direction and civic impact.
Arthur Oyako
Project Director
Dominic Lwande
Lead Researcher
Diana Zoro
Civic Designer
Eli Otieno
AI Engineer
what we're learning
Key insights generated from real-world food systems research and data auditing.
Verification must become a system responsibility
Scratch-code systems are present on many seed packages, but farmers often treat the scratch panel itself as proof of authenticity. Literacy, language, SMS access, and digital confidence barriers mean the farmers most exposed to counterfeit risk are often the least protected. Verification must move from a farmer-burdened action to a system-level responsibility supported by traceability, reporting, enforcement, and trusted last-mile channels.
Food-system trust depends on the referee layer
Counterfeit inputs are not only a product-quality problem. They expose a deeper trust problem when inspectors, verification channels, and enforcement systems can be impersonated, compromised, or ignored. Rebuilding trust requires verifiable inspectors, auditable enforcement actions, visible follow-through, and reporting systems that farmers and dealers can believe will lead to action.
Resilience is operational, not abstract
Farmers are already experiencing climate pressure as daily operational stress: heat damage, water scarcity, unreliable rainfall timing, pest risk, and conflict pressure. Climate intelligence only becomes useful when it translates forecasts into near-term decisions — when to plant, irrigate, protect, delay, spray, or seek support — and when it is delivered through channels farmers and local intermediaries can actually use.
Liquidity shapes farmer behaviour as much as price
Farmers do not always choose the highest-value market. Many choose the channel that pays fastest because planting cycles, household needs, and production costs create urgent cash-flow pressure. Brokers often win because they offer immediate liquidity, even where cooperatives or formal buyers may offer better long-term value. Food systems design therefore has to address payment velocity, working capital, cooperative finance, and market access together.
Farmer registries must become living systems
A registry that captures farmers once is not enough. Food systems need continuous updates on production, farm use, seasonal shifts, and ecosystem activity if they are to support planning, markets, resilience, and fairer service delivery.
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