# Information and Communication Technologies and Agricultural Production: New Evidence from Africa
## 1 Introduction
Moreover, in the face of climate variability and change, ICT significantly improve agricultural production, food security, profitability, and sustainable agriculture [34]. Despite the apparent benefits of ICT, there is a lack of clarity on how information and communication technologies have improved the welfare outcomes of smallholder farmers in SSA. For instance, [PERSON] et al. [35], [PERSON] [36], and [PERSON] et al. [37] indicated that ICT and other digital technologies have only 30% of active users in SSA. The low deployment or usage of ICT in agriculture in SSA is largely as a result of structural challenges and infrastructural deficit (e.g., limited and differential access to electricity, mobile networks, internet, fixed phone subscriptions, and access to technologies) that have persisted for several years [1; 34; 38; 39]. Other impediments using ICT and other digital technologies in SSA include language barriers, inappropriate policies, high cost of technology, accessibility, socio-cultural factors, poor governing framework, low electronic literacy, and low digital skills [34]. Moreover, rural areas remain less endowed in the digital ecosystems relative to the urban areas [34,40]. In the context of these challenges, mobile phones have emerged as the main tool for reducing the digital divide in Africa, helping to reduce post-harvest losses, price volatility, save time and cost in agricultural extension delivery, and provide timely information on prices, weather, financial service, and so on and so forth [41, 42, 43]. This article examines the research question of: What remains the impact of information and communication technologies on agricultural production? This topic has received much attention from researchers, particularly in the global north [44, 45, 46, 47]. Despite the existing body of knowledge, the estimation of the impact of information and communication technologies using proxies, such as mobile phone subscriptions, fixed telephone subscriptions, and individuals using internet; and covariates, such as net national income per capita and credit to the private sector covering SSA, have received less attention. The impact of information and communication technologies on economic development and agricultural production appears skewed towards the global north and Asia, with scarce evidence on SSA [48], until recently [43]. For instance, studies [44, 45] have explored the impact of internet use on economic welfare in China. [PERSON] et al. [44] examined the ramifications of internet use on good agricultural practices (GAP). Specifically, few program-specific and country studies have examined the digital technology and agricultural production nexus in Africa. Consequently, the literature [49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54] is scarce on the impact of information and communication technologies on agricultural transformation. This motivated our interest to explore the impacts of information and communication technologies on agricultural production, including livestock production, which has been neglected in the ICT-agriculture nexus literature. The existing empirical literature on the impact of information and communication technologies on agriculture in Africa is mostly based on micro data at either national or subnational levels. Recent attempts to study the issue at the continental or cross-country level include [PERSON] and [PERSON] [55] and [PERSON] et al. [56]. While [PERSON] and [PERSON] [55] broadly focused on the informal sector, [PERSON] et al. [56] examined the impact of ICTs on the agricultural sector performance in SSA using the panel autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach. This article makes three main contributions to the literature on information and communication technologies agricultural production nexus. First, our study extends beyond [PERSON] et al. [56] to include additional independent variables, such as net national income per capita; credit to private sector; and the rural population.