EAGER: Clima y Cafe: A Climate Change Adaptation Website for Policy and Production Decision-Making Support in Colombian Agriculture

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All communities do not have equal access to digital tools due to poverty, poor infrastructure, and lack of education. This is referred to as the digital divide—that is, a gap that exists between people and regions who have access to and are able to use modern information and communication technology and those who cannot. The goal of this project is to learn how we can overcome the digital divide through strategies that encourage online-to-offline sharing within local communities. The research focuses on a newly deployed website (Clima y Café) which is tailored towards Colombian coffee farmers. The project engages with the local community (i.e., local coffee grower associations with internet access) to disseminate digital information to hard-to-reach rural coffee farmers. The project will test four strategies that encourage these associations to engage in information-sharing activities of online content from the Clima y Café website and reduce the barriers of the digital divide that prevent the majority of coffee farmers from gaining access to information. The goal is to provide a novel assessment of the role of communication in constructing affordances to support policy decision-making around complex scientific issues and build a grounded theory from the data that can inform the creation of better digital affordances in other adaptation of complex scientific contexts.This project focuses specifically on addressing the capacity of communication to support climate change adaptation policy and production decision-making for Colombian coffee sector stakeholders. In 2020, the project team launched a digital platform tailored to the Colombian coffee sector to support climate change adaptation. Many farming communities, including Colombian coffee farmers, struggle with digital access, which can prevent much-needed information from reaching them. As such, one of the primary strategies was to leverage a previously identified social network strength, which are self-organizing local coffee-grower associations who have internet access, to serve as a conduit to hard-to-reach farmer populations without internet. This project seeks to uncover whether leveraging internet-access points within a community (local coffee-grower associations) and encouraging them to disseminate information across the digital divide will contribute to local engagement and information spread. This research will test four strategies to see if, how and why they do or do not lead to digital divide bridging affordances in local self-organizing associations to farmers. The four strategies include: (1) WhatsApp video messages, (2) targeted radio segments, (3) in-person small group trainings, and (4) social media engagement (Facebook + Instagram). The work will inform the development of novel models for disseminating digital information to hard-to-reach populations by utilizing the network strengths of their own local communities.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.