Social Media Adoption and Supply Chain Performance in Emerging Economies' Agriculture: Insights from Ghana's Upper West Region

Abstract

The agricultural supply chains of the developing economies have been typified by the presence of information asymmetries, ineffective coordination and ineffective market connections that still limit the productivity and welfare of smallholder farmers. Social media technologies have become low-priced digital technologies that have the capacity to mitigate these structural constraints, but evidence on the topic is limited in remote sub-Saharan African agricultural settings. This paper looks at the connection between social media adoption and the performance of supply chains between small farmers and agri-business players in the Upper West Region of Ghana. The sample size was 294 respondents, using the Yamane formula to pick the respondents based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), Social Capital Theory, and the Resource-Based View (RBV). Structured questionnaires were used to gather data, which was analysed using IBM SPSS v28 and AMOS 26. The results indicate that the perceived usefulness ( β=.341), social capital accumulation ( β=.312), information sharing (β=.287), market access facilitation ( β=.261) and collaborative network strength ( β=.234) are all positive predictors of supply chain performance (R² =.618, p =.001). The structural equation modelling establishes a good fit of the model. The research creates theoretically new and practically practical information that can be used by policymakers, development organisations and agri-business practitioners to capitalise on the use of social media as a supply chain transformation tool in frontier agricultural economies.