TikToking, WhatsApping, and Facebooking Agriculture: How Women Are Restructuring Agricultural Value Chains

During the last few decades, social media has facilitated free communication for populations around the world and has offered multiple ways for businesses to interact with their customers. Social media affects individuals and businesses in numerous ways, and in this chapter, we will investigate how female entrepreneurs create online retail businesses in the agricultural value chain using social media. To this end, a case study approach was used to present the data obtained from an in-depth interview with two female digital entrepreneurs in the agricultural value chain from Ghana. The findings revealed that social media platforms address the challenges of time, location, cost, and process of running a business by female entrepreneurs in the agricultural value chain and can be meaningfully used to overcome some of the cultural barriers in empowering women in this sector. The findings also denote how these online retail initiatives are restructuring agricultural value chains as new entrants and thereby complementing their livelihood strategies. This chapter contributes to empirical research on how social media empowers women to become digital entrepreneurs in the agricultural value chain, particularly in the context of developing countries.