AgriKonekta: A Grassroots Digital Governance Platform forYouth Engagement in Barangay Agriculture, Philippines

Abstract

This study developed and evaluated AgriKonekta, a cross-platform digital innovation designed to enhance youth engagement and automate governance operations within rural agricultural councils (Sangguniang Kabataan) in the Philippines. Addressing the challenges of manual paperwork, data vulnerabilities, and communication gaps, the platform features centralized youth profiling, real-time event broadcasting, and digital feedback collection mechanisms. Engineered using a structured Waterfall Software Development Life Cycle model, the system integrates a C# desktop administrative portal with a .NET MAUI mobile front-end application, synchronized instantly via a cloud-hosted Firebase Real-time Database. Utilizing a purposive sampling framework, an empirical evaluation based on ISO 9126 software quality standards was conducted among 75 community stakeholders, comprising 9 administrative council officials and 66 local youth residents. The empirical findings revealed a highly satisfactory composite average score of 4.62 (SD = 0.43), indicating absolute deployment readiness. The system achieved its highest marks in portability (4.76) and usability (4.71), proving that responsive mobile ecosystems successfully lower technical barriers for rural constituents. Conversely, maintainability emerged as a long-term operational trade-off due to backend cloud data complexities. The study concludes that specialized e-governance platforms effectively mitigate administrative bottlenecks and foster inclusive, data-driven civic participation. By establishing decentralized, digital profiling channels, this research directly contributes to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 9 by pioneering resilient technological infrastructure for remote community empowerment.