Based on concrete experience or evidence, how can ICT tools and communication services engage family farmers in accessing information and exchanging knowledge?
Simon WandilaSouthern Africa Telecentre Network / YPARDZambia
Dear All,
It is so encouraging to get highlights of various initiatives and thoughts. I am inspired by the WOUGNET's initiative as explained by Moses, in which an attempt to generate local relevant content has been highlighted. The TECA 'Online' Knowledge Base by FAO highlights some success story which has inspired me, and I see all these points related to the generation and management of Local and Relevant Content for family farmers.
At the heart of agricultural and other related information access and knowledge exchange is content. Farmers usually find more useful, content which has been repackaged to suit their information needs, is dynamic, delivered through a medium which they find comfortable to use and convinient to access, from trusted sources, and preferably in whose generation they have participated.
Family farmers belong to a culture, a community, they have indigenious languages, levels of trust for local leaders and whoever and whatever they perceive strange. Depending on the community's norm on these issues it would determine the level of trust as well as whether they can buy into an initiative. Family farmers are interested in local content which is dynamic, relevant and close to their traditional way of life. The language used, the personalities involved, as well as, the cultural touch between the content and their way of life, all have an influence on the level at which family farmers will adopt, use and apply the agricultural information /content or use the communication services offered.
ICT tools makes it possible for participatory content management approaches to be used. Simple and easy to use ICT tools such as mini-video cams can be made available to family farmers or simply with their simple mobile phones with camera features, can be trained on basic use of these devices to record their activities, group discussions in focus groups, or capture images of pests or other challenges and share them with peers or experts, for possible help (Information access and knowledge exchange). As part of some Contest by YPARD in 2012, I did a short video on challenges a young female farmer was facing and how the use of ICTs can be of help, I used my simple handheld digital cam to record this and free software to edit it... while doing this, I was also training 2 11th grade students on story telling... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cx1D0rCDh6U . This is a typical example of how these simple tools can be put in the hands of family farmers... Another effort is that of the story telling project http://i-am-the-story.ning.com which produced free tutorial guides for young people to tell stories using handheld cams and mobile phones, and sample videos are there... We have to appreciate here the fact that the common government extension officers are for instance in Africa, insuffient. Besides it should be noted that local content can be strategically combined with other content provided it is repackaged to suit the local language, medium of delivery, and the cultural aspect; a local touch.
Thus, ICT tools and communication services engage family farmers in accessing information and exchanging knowledge even more effectively and sustainable by involving them in the content management cycle, placing an emphasis on a Local Content approach.
A very important point is to show the rural family that ICT is not a matter merely of citizens of big cities, which are easy to use and enable the collection of knowledge to assist the development of the community.
something very important is to show that there are low-cost ICT devices and is an investment because with agricultural, livestock and forestry technical information that are available with this tool, they give economic income to ensure the well being of their families.
Another important point is that the spirit of the importance of ICT is understood by them, remember that you must first ensure food security, but to what extent if we are not careful rural families can become addicted to devices such as citizens of large cities.
an important reflection is that if we fail we as professionals be aware of the global development paradigama is harmful to the planet, we can infer a transformation of rural areas that are in technologically advanced exes.
ICTs help improve rural small and medium family businesses, but we must be careful to know when the use of ICT, passes to the limit in the communities become entrepreneurs transforming into larger environmental predators such as large coorporations.
Clearly ICTs have limits and are far from being a silver bullet, both Mowyni and Door018 have touched on this before, but I will comment on what makes our biggest limitation or success factor, the need of a well functioning human network:
This is well known and has been a topic in this forum in the past, nevertheless it is such a critical component that worth being flagged again. Technology is an enabler and only human interaction changes behaviors, this is a rule of thumb in our work with smallholder farmers or with pregnant women across the world. We put a lot of emphasis on defining the profile of a successfull agent (in our work in Grameen Foundation we work with producer or community leaders, so they are not paid technicians) in the field and looking for those specific carachteristics. We also put emphasis in understanding what makes an agent more effective than others and how this can be affected by gender or age.
Some examples, in our work using ICTs to empower extension agents, we have learned that women agents visit less farmers than men agents, but the level of repeated visits and interactions is much higher. This is because they have less time (have to take care of the home), or are unable to cover large distances and therefore, we prefer to recruit women in communities with higher densities of population.
We have also learned that women agents tend to visit poorer and more vulnerable families, and data shows that they also tend to visit more fellow women. These are key learnings and have influenced the way we recruit extension agents in communities where we want to target more women or where poverty levels are higher.
All extension agents use ICTs and all farmers in the program have the same level of access to them, but effectiveness is clearly drove by the human factor. Therefore we have to spend a lot of time understanding what motivates the agents and building incentives that respond to those motivations, which has not been a simple thing. We have found that incentives must have 3 basic elements: a) should be enough so the agent does not incurs into personal costs, b) should have an important personal learning component built, and c) must help the agent or leader gain more recognition in their communities. In our experience if agents dont incur into personal costs, we need to work on the others as those are more important than compensation.
I'm happy with these interesting discussions. The volume of response and enthousiasm alone are indication enough of the potential of ICT in agricultural development!
This rightly-founded optimism aside, I think there is also cause for a critical perspective on how projects in this space are set up. One of the points for my greater concern is wrapped in the way that the question to this discussion string is formulated. The question, in my perspective, overemphasizes the importance of the solution, rather than the way the opportunity for the solution was defined.
Why is this relevant? Technology is always an amplification of existing behavior. If we understand the behavioral rationale of the intended end-users of a product or service, then we are better able to design specific solutions that connect with the jobs they're trying to get done.
However, by omitting opportunity definition from the presentation of the solution case, we lose the insights that were used to create the service in the first place. We won't be able to improve and learn about our approaches, let alone create conditions for replication and scale.
So instead of the question above, I would give the discussion a different angle. Perhaps something along the following line:
What are relevant insights about family farmers that can inform the design of ICT and communication services that target them?
The writer mentions how ESOKO stumbled on use cases after developing and implementing their solution. That is not the way I would recommend doing it. Some exploratory user research would have helped define these surprises upfront. But the point is that farmers, luckily, found their own way in use of the platform to do the existing jobs of meetings, and getting feedback on using a new pesticides more effectively and efficiently.
Sorry to be a bit of a curmudgeon here, but I think the above is often missing in our conversations, and that it hampers our progress. I hope to hear about your perspective on this.
Total Strongly Agree, to develop ICT applications in web portals, smart phones and other devices is necessary to know the applicability with the end user and actually serve to solve their training needs
We have been discussing about the use of ICTs to support knowledge sharing and families to adopt best practices. I want to bring another topic here which is as important, using ICTs to help businesses transact with smallholder farmers. This might not address Nafia question on transacted or paid services as we are still on prototype phase but should evolve to a fee per service model if successful.
m-sourcing:
In southwest Colombia, Grameen Foundation is providing ICT services to family horticultural farmers that are organized in small associations and then one commercial company (aggregator) sells their produce to large Colombian supermarkets and grocery stores. Working with this aggregator, we are currently testing the viability of a mobile sourcing (mSourcing) and mobile purchasing tool (mPurchasing) to promote efficiency and standardize product sourcing processes; increasing farmer revenues and participation.
Connecting smallholder farmers to the market, this commercial aggregator is an indispensable ally for farmers and their associations. It takes daily supermarket orders, disperses these orders among the associations, and delivers the final products from the associations to the grocery stores. While the commercial aggregator connects farmers to the market, it does so in an inefficient way. They previously managed order sourcing, purchasing, and sales using a series of simple spreadsheets, whiteboards and mostly phone calls. One of the biggest inefficiencies of this approach is that the aggregator does not or inadequately collects information about individual farmers, associations, and products requested and delivered, delaying farmer payments and leading to incorrect information and production planning. Because the aggregator did not previously track this information, there was little transparency in the processes and family farmers knew very little about the final delivery of their product. Additionally, farmers did not have the correct information about the quantities of crops they should be planting and harvesting.
To solve these inefficiencies and lack of information sharing with family farmers, we are developing an m-Sourcing tool (with plans to build an m-Purchasing tool in the future). Through a series of surveys done on mobile phones and tablets, grocery store orders are placed, assigned to associations, and assigned to farmers as purchase tickets. These surveys provide real-time updates to a series of reports, which are then used to provide association leaders more detailed information about each individual farmer and to make farmer payments.
While we are still in the prototype stages of this ICT project, we have already been met with positive results.
40 hours of admo. work a week eliminated in report building at the aggrgator level
1,577 order cycles completed
$42,667 in sales in the last month
13,164 surveys completed
Farmer buy-in:
Farmers are excited about the project and have approached Grameen Foundation about additional functionalities that they would like to see in the mSourcing tool like
Production planning surveys
Text messages notifying them about orders and payment
Farm management plans
Yearly and monthly production planning
Traceability for products.
In the future, this technology will be amplified to involve farmer level reports that farmers themselves receive, to provide agricultural extension services (information about crop production and quality will be loaded onto the tablets and shared with farmers), text message notifications, and mobile payments. We expect that these tools respond to a current market failure, and if we can continue to provide value to established businesses then these will continue to transact from smallholder farmers and maybe one day, this can be a fee per service model.
Excellent example Alberto! Interesting to read on how you mapped the existing practices of information sharing, before designing what your sourcing tool should do. I'd also be keen to know how the mobile interface works out for farmers. Do they understand it? Do they trust it? Is it convenient enough for them to use? Any ideas for interoperability with other applications like mobile money? I'd be keen to know.
Btw, if you are interested, I've recently written a report on some of the challenges I've encountered in the mobile for agriculture space. It also contains some tips for better research to inform solution design. Report can be found here.
I will be reviewing the report you just shared. About your questions let me try to respond:
- Mobile interface and farmers usage: The mobile interface is quite simple but robust, design for last mile usage therefore is very friendly, intuitive and easy to use . http://taroworks.org/, here you can find the information. Taro runs in android phones and uses Salesforce.com as backend which is excellent as we have the security of a corporate CRM and the versatility of Android platform. We use both tablets and smartphones but always with the human network, therefore a community leader is the one trained to use the platform and this person interacts with the indicidual farmer. We are just starting to use SMS so we can assign the purcahse order to the farmer directly (beta-testing), to do sms blasting is quite easy, but we need to start by having the leader visit the producer so they understand the system and the technology, so when they start to receive the sms they know what to do. This takes several visits, trust and adoption dont come naturaly, they need to be cultivated.
An important aspect is that the producers have gave us tipson how this product could add more value to them, I listed some of the suggestion they provided.This is important as they are as essential in the process as the supermarket or the aggregator and we need to add value across the chain to drive adoption.
In average a community leader can be trained fully on the use of the mobiles and the platform in 2 days, we have done it with leaders starting with 6 years of schooling, but most tend to have 7-10 years of education. We do conduct simple test on basic aritmethics, reading and comprenhension to select leaders.
-About interoperability: In Colombia mobile wallets are new but available, and you can basically register your sim card and associate it to a bank account quite easy. We will be training the leaders to do that and so farmers could receive a mobile payment if needed, but, our challenge is having enough cash in and cash out points so its convenient for the farmers. Our platform is independent to m-wallets, which is great as we dont have to create them, through Salesforce we are creating purchase payment reports that mirror the internet banking payroll forms, so its painless to distribute the payments.
Finally, we are considering to do a gradual mobile payment strategy, which means to start paying 80% of the orders as done today and 20% through the mobile wallet, and gradually increase the %. This is still TBD as first we need to secure the cash in/out points.
I know I provided quite detail here, happy to follow up offline.
Yes, I would love to talk further about your experience. In fact, I'm working on a side project to create a community of practice of organisations working on developing new business models in emerging markets. I would love to interview you as part of building this community. I'll be in touch soon!
Dear All,
It is so encouraging to get highlights of various initiatives and thoughts. I am inspired by the WOUGNET's initiative as explained by Moses, in which an attempt to generate local relevant content has been highlighted. The TECA 'Online' Knowledge Base by FAO highlights some success story which has inspired me, and I see all these points related to the generation and management of Local and Relevant Content for family farmers.
At the heart of agricultural and other related information access and knowledge exchange is content. Farmers usually find more useful, content which has been repackaged to suit their information needs, is dynamic, delivered through a medium which they find comfortable to use and convinient to access, from trusted sources, and preferably in whose generation they have participated.
Family farmers belong to a culture, a community, they have indigenious languages, levels of trust for local leaders and whoever and whatever they perceive strange. Depending on the community's norm on these issues it would determine the level of trust as well as whether they can buy into an initiative. Family farmers are interested in local content which is dynamic, relevant and close to their traditional way of life. The language used, the personalities involved, as well as, the cultural touch between the content and their way of life, all have an influence on the level at which family farmers will adopt, use and apply the agricultural information /content or use the communication services offered.
ICT tools makes it possible for participatory content management approaches to be used. Simple and easy to use ICT tools such as mini-video cams can be made available to family farmers or simply with their simple mobile phones with camera features, can be trained on basic use of these devices to record their activities, group discussions in focus groups, or capture images of pests or other challenges and share them with peers or experts, for possible help (Information access and knowledge exchange). As part of some Contest by YPARD in 2012, I did a short video on challenges a young female farmer was facing and how the use of ICTs can be of help, I used my simple handheld digital cam to record this and free software to edit it... while doing this, I was also training 2 11th grade students on story telling... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cx1D0rCDh6U . This is a typical example of how these simple tools can be put in the hands of family farmers... Another effort is that of the story telling project http://i-am-the-story.ning.com which produced free tutorial guides for young people to tell stories using handheld cams and mobile phones, and sample videos are there... We have to appreciate here the fact that the common government extension officers are for instance in Africa, insuffient. Besides it should be noted that local content can be strategically combined with other content provided it is repackaged to suit the local language, medium of delivery, and the cultural aspect; a local touch.
Thus, ICT tools and communication services engage family farmers in accessing information and exchanging knowledge even more effectively and sustainable by involving them in the content management cycle, placing an emphasis on a Local Content approach.
A very important point is to show the rural family that ICT is not a matter merely of citizens of big cities, which are easy to use and enable the collection of knowledge to assist the development of the community.
something very important is to show that there are low-cost ICT devices and is an investment because with agricultural, livestock and forestry technical information that are available with this tool, they give economic income to ensure the well being of their families.
Another important point is that the spirit of the importance of ICT is understood by them, remember that you must first ensure food security, but to what extent if we are not careful rural families can become addicted to devices such as citizens of large cities.
an important reflection is that if we fail we as professionals be aware of the global development paradigama is harmful to the planet, we can infer a transformation of rural areas that are in technologically advanced exes.
ICTs help improve rural small and medium family businesses, but we must be careful to know when the use of ICT, passes to the limit in the communities become entrepreneurs transforming into larger environmental predators such as large coorporations.
I could explain?
ICT is important but with limits
Clearly ICTs have limits and are far from being a silver bullet, both Mowyni and Door018 have touched on this before, but I will comment on what makes our biggest limitation or success factor, the need of a well functioning human network:
This is well known and has been a topic in this forum in the past, nevertheless it is such a critical component that worth being flagged again. Technology is an enabler and only human interaction changes behaviors, this is a rule of thumb in our work with smallholder farmers or with pregnant women across the world. We put a lot of emphasis on defining the profile of a successfull agent (in our work in Grameen Foundation we work with producer or community leaders, so they are not paid technicians) in the field and looking for those specific carachteristics. We also put emphasis in understanding what makes an agent more effective than others and how this can be affected by gender or age.
Some examples, in our work using ICTs to empower extension agents, we have learned that women agents visit less farmers than men agents, but the level of repeated visits and interactions is much higher. This is because they have less time (have to take care of the home), or are unable to cover large distances and therefore, we prefer to recruit women in communities with higher densities of population.
We have also learned that women agents tend to visit poorer and more vulnerable families, and data shows that they also tend to visit more fellow women. These are key learnings and have influenced the way we recruit extension agents in communities where we want to target more women or where poverty levels are higher.
All extension agents use ICTs and all farmers in the program have the same level of access to them, but effectiveness is clearly drove by the human factor. Therefore we have to spend a lot of time understanding what motivates the agents and building incentives that respond to those motivations, which has not been a simple thing. We have found that incentives must have 3 basic elements: a) should be enough so the agent does not incurs into personal costs, b) should have an important personal learning component built, and c) must help the agent or leader gain more recognition in their communities. In our experience if agents dont incur into personal costs, we need to work on the others as those are more important than compensation.
Hello All,
I'm happy with these interesting discussions. The volume of response and enthousiasm alone are indication enough of the potential of ICT in agricultural development!
This rightly-founded optimism aside, I think there is also cause for a critical perspective on how projects in this space are set up. One of the points for my greater concern is wrapped in the way that the question to this discussion string is formulated. The question, in my perspective, overemphasizes the importance of the solution, rather than the way the opportunity for the solution was defined.
Why is this relevant? Technology is always an amplification of existing behavior. If we understand the behavioral rationale of the intended end-users of a product or service, then we are better able to design specific solutions that connect with the jobs they're trying to get done.
However, by omitting opportunity definition from the presentation of the solution case, we lose the insights that were used to create the service in the first place. We won't be able to improve and learn about our approaches, let alone create conditions for replication and scale.
So instead of the question above, I would give the discussion a different angle. Perhaps something along the following line:
What are relevant insights about family farmers that can inform the design of ICT and communication services that target them?
As an example I would suggest to read this blog entry from the people at ESOKO, an SMS-based communication services for farmers
The writer mentions how ESOKO stumbled on use cases after developing and implementing their solution. That is not the way I would recommend doing it. Some exploratory user research would have helped define these surprises upfront. But the point is that farmers, luckily, found their own way in use of the platform to do the existing jobs of meetings, and getting feedback on using a new pesticides more effectively and efficiently.
Sorry to be a bit of a curmudgeon here, but I think the above is often missing in our conversations, and that it hampers our progress. I hope to hear about your perspective on this.
Best wishes
Bart
@bartdoorneweert
Total Strongly Agree, to develop ICT applications in web portals, smart phones and other devices is necessary to know the applicability with the end user and actually serve to solve their training needs
Ongoing at IFAD, within the framework of the Year of Family Farming - follow the webstream: http://webcasting.ifad.org/ict4youth
Some highlights will be shared on this forum.
We have been discussing about the use of ICTs to support knowledge sharing and families to adopt best practices. I want to bring another topic here which is as important, using ICTs to help businesses transact with smallholder farmers. This might not address Nafia question on transacted or paid services as we are still on prototype phase but should evolve to a fee per service model if successful.
m-sourcing:
In southwest Colombia, Grameen Foundation is providing ICT services to family horticultural farmers that are organized in small associations and then one commercial company (aggregator) sells their produce to large Colombian supermarkets and grocery stores. Working with this aggregator, we are currently testing the viability of a mobile sourcing (mSourcing) and mobile purchasing tool (mPurchasing) to promote efficiency and standardize product sourcing processes; increasing farmer revenues and participation.
Connecting smallholder farmers to the market, this commercial aggregator is an indispensable ally for farmers and their associations. It takes daily supermarket orders, disperses these orders among the associations, and delivers the final products from the associations to the grocery stores. While the commercial aggregator connects farmers to the market, it does so in an inefficient way. They previously managed order sourcing, purchasing, and sales using a series of simple spreadsheets, whiteboards and mostly phone calls. One of the biggest inefficiencies of this approach is that the aggregator does not or inadequately collects information about individual farmers, associations, and products requested and delivered, delaying farmer payments and leading to incorrect information and production planning. Because the aggregator did not previously track this information, there was little transparency in the processes and family farmers knew very little about the final delivery of their product. Additionally, farmers did not have the correct information about the quantities of crops they should be planting and harvesting.
To solve these inefficiencies and lack of information sharing with family farmers, we are developing an m-Sourcing tool (with plans to build an m-Purchasing tool in the future). Through a series of surveys done on mobile phones and tablets, grocery store orders are placed, assigned to associations, and assigned to farmers as purchase tickets. These surveys provide real-time updates to a series of reports, which are then used to provide association leaders more detailed information about each individual farmer and to make farmer payments.
While we are still in the prototype stages of this ICT project, we have already been met with positive results.
Farmer buy-in:
Farmers are excited about the project and have approached Grameen Foundation about additional functionalities that they would like to see in the mSourcing tool like
In the future, this technology will be amplified to involve farmer level reports that farmers themselves receive, to provide agricultural extension services (information about crop production and quality will be loaded onto the tablets and shared with farmers), text message notifications, and mobile payments. We expect that these tools respond to a current market failure, and if we can continue to provide value to established businesses then these will continue to transact from smallholder farmers and maybe one day, this can be a fee per service model.
Excellent example Alberto! Interesting to read on how you mapped the existing practices of information sharing, before designing what your sourcing tool should do. I'd also be keen to know how the mobile interface works out for farmers. Do they understand it? Do they trust it? Is it convenient enough for them to use? Any ideas for interoperability with other applications like mobile money? I'd be keen to know.
Btw, if you are interested, I've recently written a report on some of the challenges I've encountered in the mobile for agriculture space. It also contains some tips for better research to inform solution design. Report can be found here.
Thanks Doorn018,
I will be reviewing the report you just shared. About your questions let me try to respond:
- Mobile interface and farmers usage: The mobile interface is quite simple but robust, design for last mile usage therefore is very friendly, intuitive and easy to use . http://taroworks.org/, here you can find the information. Taro runs in android phones and uses Salesforce.com as backend which is excellent as we have the security of a corporate CRM and the versatility of Android platform. We use both tablets and smartphones but always with the human network, therefore a community leader is the one trained to use the platform and this person interacts with the indicidual farmer. We are just starting to use SMS so we can assign the purcahse order to the farmer directly (beta-testing), to do sms blasting is quite easy, but we need to start by having the leader visit the producer so they understand the system and the technology, so when they start to receive the sms they know what to do. This takes several visits, trust and adoption dont come naturaly, they need to be cultivated.
An important aspect is that the producers have gave us tipson how this product could add more value to them, I listed some of the suggestion they provided.This is important as they are as essential in the process as the supermarket or the aggregator and we need to add value across the chain to drive adoption.
In average a community leader can be trained fully on the use of the mobiles and the platform in 2 days, we have done it with leaders starting with 6 years of schooling, but most tend to have 7-10 years of education. We do conduct simple test on basic aritmethics, reading and comprenhension to select leaders.
-About interoperability: In Colombia mobile wallets are new but available, and you can basically register your sim card and associate it to a bank account quite easy. We will be training the leaders to do that and so farmers could receive a mobile payment if needed, but, our challenge is having enough cash in and cash out points so its convenient for the farmers. Our platform is independent to m-wallets, which is great as we dont have to create them, through Salesforce we are creating purchase payment reports that mirror the internet banking payroll forms, so its painless to distribute the payments.
Finally, we are considering to do a gradual mobile payment strategy, which means to start paying 80% of the orders as done today and 20% through the mobile wallet, and gradually increase the %. This is still TBD as first we need to secure the cash in/out points.
I know I provided quite detail here, happy to follow up offline.
Hi Alberto,
Yes, I would love to talk further about your experience. In fact, I'm working on a side project to create a community of practice of organisations working on developing new business models in emerging markets. I would love to interview you as part of building this community. I'll be in touch soon!
Bart Doorneweert (doorn018 ;)