Breaking silos in digital development

Fragmented digital solutions formulated in silos can result in poor user experiences, entrenched information blockages, constrained uptake and artificially limited scope.

Take digital agricultural extension advisory, for example. These systems are crucial for small-scale farmers in low- and middle-income countries, helping them make agricultural decisions that improve food security, generate income and safeguard their communities. However, many of these programs are developed in sectoral silos, focusing narrowly on agricultural productivity. This overlooks important factors like nutrition, water usage and - critical for today’s world - climate impacts. This limited perspective hinders participants from receiving comprehensive information, leading to inefficient allocation of resources. This silo is also detrimental at the policy and planning level. It results in duplicative expenditure if initiatives are implemented in parallel. The data and insights gathered remain isolated in their respective siloes, preventing a holistic understanding of the challenges individuals face and how they are best addressed.

Genesis Analytics partnered with USAID and DAI under the Digital Frontiers initiative to formulate a practical guidance note to address this challenge. The note equips USAID mission staff, advisors and implementing partners working in agriculture, resilience, nutrition, and WSSH to deliver digital solutions that holistically meet a variety of program participant needs, by breaking the right silos in solution design, deployment and delivery.

The note is highly interactive, designed with the user at heart. Open it in full screen and click through it like a website to discover the three key components for actualising silo-breaking solutions.

The first component sets out why silo-breaking matters, while highlighting the bundling, interoperability and horizontal products as three common mechanisms for silo-breaking. We then provide a clear, four-step process to identify silo-breaking opportunities in one’s own work, namely:

1. Empathise with the whole participant
2. Assess frankly one’s own silos,
3. Landscape the adjacent solutions and influences
4. Integrate across the silos.

Finally, the note offers nine practical lessons learned, drawn from six case studies from programmes that effectively break constraining siloes. This section is complete with prompting questions to help readers integrate the lessons into their own work, and is filled with links to relevant external resources.