Introduction

Small-scale farmers in the Global South do not want to be ‘passive victims’ of the COVID-19 crisis, as stated by an urban farmer from a township in Cape Town.

While the Cape Town team mobilized farmers in other township to participate in this research, the SLE team raised funds and extended the research cooperation to include farmer organizations in Zimbabwe, Indonesia and Mozambique. A core motivation for the ‘COVID-19 impact on local food systems’ project was the development of creative research methods to identify the impacts and record the coping strategies related to this global pandemic.

This call for engagement was encouraged by international organizations so as to identify the potential opportunities for intervention within the crisis, and to report on the increasingly visible fault lines of existing food systems from a producer's perspective (Bello, 2020; Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition, 2020).

This chapter seeks to provide insights into the application of a digital survey collection tool, which gains importance particularly in crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Realtime data can contribute to rapid responses for policy actions and decision-making, and, moreover, when collected by smallscale farmers can give a voice to the often unheard. Another potential benefit lies in the applied co-research process, which may lead to action and change in the participating community. The chapter describes the collaborative research and reflects on the benefits and challenges of this type of digital rapidresponse research, and reflects on ethical considerations on the participation of partners and the digital team-building process.