Question 1 (opens 17 Sept.)

Rob,

Am sure your farmers will benefit a lot when they get hooked to the Grameen Foundation Farmer call center in Uganda. This call center serves farmers in different languages in Uganda and boasts of specialists with knowledge across the entire value chain. Am sure the problem of content deficiency is half solved. For more Farmer call center information Click here

My only concern about the Grameen model is that it is not financially self-sustainable.  How much innovation can we or should we advocate if it is dependant on donor funding?

The question of sustainability and viability of call centres is a good one. At Esoko, we are also piloting a call centre that provides information to farmers in local languages in Ghana. To finance it we are selling this same service to agribusinesses who need to provide their outgrowers with content on key best practices. We are also trying to partner with the mobile operators to leverage their distribution force and marketing might in order to get the word out about the helpline and maintain a high number of calls. But again, the call centre is in the initial stages, and the question of whether it will be viable remains. Typically call centres are expensive and difficult to manage, so you certainly need to take this into consideration. 

call center sustainability is indeed a big question/challenges.

To be the best of my knowledge, I don't know initiatives that have completly succeeded in this area. I've seen two different strategies: increasing revenue and decreasing costs.

Increasing revenue is imho a relatively dead-end. The cost can be partially covered by users through e.g. premium number, but all the business modelling that i've seen and that we have tried just show that this is impossible, even if you remove the front costs of setup. The time and work force needed to answer calls cannot be covered by the caller. e.g. a caller can manage less than 100 calls a day and it is impossible to get enough money out of the premium rate to pay someone on 100 calls.

Then the second option is to have other source of funding, like advertisements or  partnership with interested organizations. Sometimes those partnership are questionable from an ethic perspective. e.g. partnering with  a fertilizer company that can measure the icrease of sales. Here again while this might work at low scale, this is not really scalable has when the number of callers increases, the costs are exploding.

So pure human-based call centre are therefore very unlikely to be sustainable. The second strategy is to decrease costs and specifically decrease the human requirements. This is where ict can help. Voice technologies can happily support call center and take care of automatically delivering answers to farmers when these answers are already in the call centre database. The knowledge workers (the guy at the call center) will then only have to manage new requests. over the time has the knowledge base increase, the load of calls decline and may reach an inflexion point where scale and content provide sustainability.

We have started to implement such strategy in India with lifeline india (http://lifelines-india.net/ ). See our report: http://www.webfoundation.org/2012/02/vbat-lessons-and-future-steps/

The first step was to implement a localized FAQ system that enable lifeline to save close to 10% of calls automatically answered.

steph

The reality of call center sustainability is Partnership especially if its inclined to helping farmers. According to Grameen, the Sustainability and viability all goes back to the different stakeholders involved in using the call center services. According to their findings, people would love to make use of the call center but they prefer a free service, thus if the different organisations that deal with especially farmers subscribe to such a service then callers can access a free service. Grameen is trying to borrow a leaf from India, with Kisan Call Center (KCC) and how it has managed to stand for all this long but will hook them to Stephen's webfoundation for more lessons.

Hello, Don't you think Grameen Foundation might have some exit strategies to successfully transition the program into the hands of the Uganda's Ministry of Agriculture? I am sure the capacity building taking place, with the use of the community knowledge workers (not external expertise) may help in sustainability. That is if GF is able to convince the government about the impact of the program during its lifetime.

Prior to all these technologies, the national governments have their own extension systems with emphasis on the traditional media. So a little collaboration with the ministries during the program phase can also help in sustenance.

Ben

I agree with Robert, lack of content is a major limiting factor in delivering advisory services to farmers - through any media. Ofcourse, the Ministries and the government research agencies have a lot of content to offer but in many instances they are not in a format that is easily accessible for advisory services to be built on-top of them.

Mobile phones as a delivery medium, for agricultural information services, holds great promise, there are about 6 billion mobile connections in use today and investment in infrastructure and improvements in the last mile connectivity are seeing progress.

Agriculture is the mainstay of the rural sector of Sri Lanka. Farmers are resource poor and face constraints in gaining access to information and knowledge not only to improve crop productivity but also to compete in business environment. To expose rural farmer to knowledge and information, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka has built an innovative ICT-based farmer education program that is Online Diploma in Agro-technology in local languages and English. This is the first-ever attempt by Sri Lankan university system for giving opportunity for farmers to pursue further education through Open and distance learning with appropriate information and communication technologies while being engaged in their cultivations. Course lessons developed by Agriculture experts were converted to an interactive digital form into online Learning Management System (LMS) in Moodle. A prototype was developed and implemented with farmers all around the country.

Even though many internet based online courses are available, due to incompetency in English language, local farmers are unable to follow them. This was the major reason to develop an online Diploma program in Agro -technology in local language. To considering the easy access and without any fixed learning times, the program was converted to an Online Distance Learning Program. However Sri Lankan farmers have never even dreamt for the university education. The Online e-diploma program started in 2008 in order to solve this problem.

The Online Diploma in Agro-technology program consists of eight Certificate Courses on diverse agriculture subjects. Learning Management system (LMS) was developed in local language using Moodle and online discussion forums and chat sessions were also designed in LMS to discuss their day-to-day issues in agriculture with their colleagues and teachers. Solutions and advices given by them would allow farmers to solve problems in cultivations easily. The courses and lessons were developed based on farmer needs. Through this farmers are getting useful, relevant and updated knowledge and information on issues in agriculture. In an effort to improve retention and quality of learning of farmers, a number of steps were taken in preparation of study materials to enhance guidance and advice. Learner support is also provided through learner guides, print material, CDs and DVDs, face-to-face discussions, computer assisted instruction and video-conferencing in local language. To encourage peer interactions, online learning groups based on agriculture interest of student farmers have been facilitated. The courses can be accessed through any one of the National Online Distance Education Service Access Centers which are established by Ministry of Higher Education with all ICT facilities and the Government ICT centers located throughout the country, or through student personal computers.

As the result of following the program, knowledge on agriculture and accessing the relevant information for farming has been significantly improved. Through this program all student farmers have empowered towards learning and farming. There is an improvement of personal and professional characters of farmers. Because of the program, communication ability, social contacts and leadership qualities of farmers have been improved. Due to increment of their income via improving their cultivations they have gained a higher social status in community. Also the program showed positive impacts on the farmers’ entrepreneurship ability, marketing capacity, social mobilization and agri-business creations by following the course and transforming traditional farms to professional ones. Online distance learning is a suitable method for farmers to learn. This is a new and modern opportunity for younger generation who lack knowledge and information on agriculture and for those who have special interest on agriculture. Also, this program is considered to student farmers as a way of keeping themselves with satisfaction and pride towards agriculture as their profession.

Yet another (ICT for agricultural) initiative in Sri Lanka is the market price information system that is collected, managed and disseminated through an active public-private partnership through Mobitel Ltd. Under the  Dialog Tradenet initiative, Govi Gnana Seva (GSS) and Dialog Telekom (MNO) deliver spot market rates for 178 different vegetables and fruits in Sinhalese and Tamil languages.

As a startup based on agriculture, at Tambero.com we developed free tools to optimize the production of small and medium farmers worldwide. Right now we have users un 89 countries, most of them in South America, Asia and Africa. Our free system uses innovative ideas and trends such as QR codes to track information about land parcels and cattle in the cell phone.

Thanks to these innovations we have been recognized in various fields of technology, however it has been difficult to have the support of agricultural aid organizations. It often seems that offer free radical innovation does not always fit into the schemes of agriculture and international aid organizations. 

You can see an example of QR usage here:

https://twitter.com/tamberoweb/status/245148120185450496