Question 2 (opens 27 Nov.) What critical challenges persist in our field, and what is needed to overcome these challenges...

The following  is based on my experience in the field(Mbale District-Uganda)

Challenges of integrating gender

1.      Cultural prejudice that continue to be used by men to control women
2.      Insecurity of some men when their wives’ voices are frequently aired on the radio (either as star  or radio farmers) and when given phones to use.
3.      Lack of capacity by  the actors to identify and integrate gender in all stages of work
4.      African women seem to fear their husbands rather than respecting them so it was not easy                    conduct interviews to  get their perspectives,or train them on the use of technology in presences of their husbands.
5.      Sometimes, male representatives and or service providers on the radio or other technology in dessemination of information get excited (sometimes use ‘inappropriate’ words) when females call in and this seems to annoy and discourage their husbands from allowing their    wives to call in.

Recommendations for better integration of gender

1. Tease out gender issues at planning stages
2. Identify strategies to address gender issues e.g. the gender proposals for under beans 
3. Affirmative action in favor of women for example in selecting beneficiaries, interviewees, enterprises  and technologies
4. Provide instant incentives tagged to women’s participation. For example the presenter can promise to give a few kilograms of seed/T-shirt/cap for every woman who will call during the radio program. This incentive mechanism can be facilitated by partnering with seed/input companies/schools/banks/microfinance other institutions.
5. Listener clubs for different categories of people (Youth, men, women, PWDs and mixed ones)
6. Sensitize radio producers and presenters on gender
7. Capturing testimonies from women and airing them. Better if these testimonies from women who have succeeded in collaborating with her husband e.g. her husband  allows her more access to funds 

dwakhata,  Thanks for highlighting some of the many challenges women face as they attempt to benefit and participate in the services made available to them through ICT.  

The vocabulary you employ (cultural prejudice, insecurity, fear, excited, inappropriate...) suggest that the discrimination women face is not isolated to ICT initiatives, but rather is very much ingrained in the surrounding culture.  Of course, that is not to say that our projects cannot help chip away at such cultural divides.

Interventions such as incentives for female participants and gender-based listener's clubs may make things easier for women in the short term, but in the long run they are still separating genders and suggesting that women are somehow different or merit different attention than men (this applies in some situations--such as health issues--but not, I believe, in professional arenas such as agriculture).  

The best solutions are those that promote equal treatment of both genders.  Examples include the consideration of gender issues in the planning stages and, most importantly, sensitization of people in power (in your example, the radio producers and presenter) that you rightly mention.  Another avenue is the engagement of "crusader" women in the spotlight of the project (in your example, as producers or presenters) who are willing to perhaps face some discrimination and hardship in the name of demonstrating that their gender is no different when it comes to business/agriculture/etc.  As we all know, putting a face and a personality on a "faceless" issue (such as gender discrimiantion) is the most effective way to change individuals' perceptions.  

Thanks for bringing up this hugely important point.

Dear all,
Dwakatha, I want to share the Malawian experience in this space of Gender and ICTs in the agricultaral arena and the lessons that we have learned.
1. When we started off deployment of Esoko,  a web to sms platform through which smallholders were receiveing market prices and extension messages; we had not thouroyghly conducted an assessment on gender and its dynamics as relates to the targeted audience i.e. rural smallholders. As we closed the initial phase it was clear this was an oversight and had to be done. Hence I recommend that such assessments on access to eqipment such as cellphones,radios and other gadgets to be used for information service delivery , mapping of gender roles e.t.c should be done prior to deployment to design initiatives that will start addressing these gaps.
2. When we did the assessment through focus group discussions, one on one interviews, database checks and observations; it was clear that:
 - Over 65% of the agricultural workforce doing the work in the fields for food crops from land preparation through postharvest handling were women. Men were more involved in marketing.
 - Most women did not have access to cellphones yet information was sent through phone. 86% of male smallholders were registered to receive market and extension information via SMS on their cellphones while women smallholders only made 14% of those registered. The gender disparity is pretty wide in terms of access to te cellphones. From focus group discussions, it was interesting to note that men did not share some of the infromation on extension with their female counterparts regardless of the fact that it was the womn that did most of the farm work hence needed the information more. Men were not willig to let their wives have ceelphones for reasons ranging from that of  women being vulnerable to communicate with other man friends to others saying they just didnt think it was necessary for a woman to have a phone anyway.

We resolved to do the following inorder to start addressing these gaps:_
1. Encourage families i.e. husband and wife to attend trainings as an item, not as individual farmers.
2. During trainings emphasise the importance of sharing information
3. Bring in smallholder family role models to share their success stories with fellow farmers. Smllholders that share information and can link this to increased production and quality or even the ability to bargain for better prices and to make informed decisions with income.

Just thought I woupd share some of the experiences we have had and how we are dealing with issues and to gauge how others have dealt with similar instances elsewhere.

-

In promoting collective action in smallholder agriculture as well as  governance and transparency and in any value chain, TRUST becomes the foundation on which value chain engagement thrives.

When producers are assured that there is transparency in the market information they are receiving from the marketplace, their impetus to production is enhanced. When buyers know that the farmers are not cheating on the quality of the produce, their confidence in buying hence promoting productive engagement is enhanced.

The use of standards in agriculture has been the biggest challenge in the food chain and integrating ICT in a sector that has challenges itself becomes an even bigger challenge. The organization that I founded to address smallholder engagement with the marketplace came on the background of this challenge. Standards of quality are known and documented well in the various ISO provisions. Those associated with the production layer of the value chain can only use one standard..weights and measures.

The use of digital weighing that collects data from a digital load cell, capturing it in the scale's primary memory for future download to a database or streaming through GSM technology to a database with the eventual transparent processing of the data for aggregation to satisfy a buyer ensures a transparent payment.

This intervention is what we provided and continue to develop to create trust and confidence in the agricultural value chain. With no leakages of incomes and weights to the buyers, we have witnessed the infusion of transparency which has created engagement into agriculture for a large number of value chain actors at all the layers of the chain. More on the technology is available in my ICT4Ag company www.octagon.co.ke.

The capacity building of the farmers is critical which is why we had to create the Value Addition and Cottage Industry Development in Africa (VACID Africa) to create a pull to technology consumption. Because farmers never existed in forms that can procure technology, we have had to go through the lengthy route of creating collectives as the vehicle of collective procurement of value chain inputs including our own technology which is delivered at market prices. Smallholder farmers pay at the same price as Unilever and they are better clients in the same. The creation of farmer owned organizations with shared ICT benefits has further promoted trust as the ICT resources are managed by the local community or their children. Since the aggregation of produce promotes income generation in better negotiated terms, farmer owned agribusinesses have been possible and their ability to hire professional managers eliminates the concern that would otherwise arise.

In a nutshell, the TRUST element and comes by ensuring tamper proof technologies in what farmers produce and convincing them, in their own language that there is no chance of loss of produce or their sweat effort.

We have seen more ICTs and m-apps coming to the market out of the base solution that we provide. We need to pad more solutions around this foundation that we have created. It is driving many businesses, it can drive ICT4Ag research but the community ICT integration which we do through the telecentre modeling is the critical driver.

It is necessary to point out that TRUST is an element of the passage of time. Anyone seeking to achievev trust must be patient.

Kiringai

 Hi Mr Kiringai
From our experience in Spain trying to implement new technologies that create new data and information to growers for a better crop in-puts management we have seen that the key important point is to find technical people that want to change and be leaders in this process.

As i don´t have experience in Africa (only in South America) my question is if from your experience implementing ICT solutions you have found more succed through the private sector with  professional managers hired from farmer owned organizations with aggregation of produce or with the extension  agents from the state or the region helping the growers?

We need tech people in the field "filtering" information and helping growers, as doctors started to do so 150 years ago when in medicine objective diagnostic methods had market approach. I am agricultural engineer and i see a big opportunity with the ICT revolution in agriculture for our career and i think we could be the key point to promote the change in contact with farmers. With ICT solutions they will be able to help big areas with crops that they know well  and build trust with the growers because they have on-line technical data and knowledge that help him to promote preventive alarms before the problems arrive.

I agree with other posts that the first step to be done with ICT solutions in developing countries should be to introduce "simple technical concepts of crop management": thats were this apps and mobile phone could help a lot. They will help to promote acces with critical information to growers for the basics of how to improve good crop practices.

Less people are talking about a second step,  that could be done in those more advanced private  farmer owned organizations that are you talking about, that has technical staff and professional managers,  were could be  possible to introduce few new technologies (wether forecast that learns from its microclimate, sensors, remote sensing, data from field with digital uptake etc) to create data to optimize crop in-puts management and technical decitions (when, what, how ) solving "temporal" crop problems (treatments, irrigation, fertilizers use)  and helping them to create its own know-how and history from their own experience which could be linked as a technical "module" in a ERP solution. This second step should be done very carefully in terms of adapting technology to customers request, but it will lead to a "prevention" stage, were from the know how developed in the area and in the most important crops, the growers will take technical decisions that let them to improve crop management and improve their profits. Here mobile phone will help too.

Alvarez,
 
It is indeed true that the most important aspect in introducing ICT4Ag is the identification of passionate and technical people who are keen to changing the status quo as well as being leaders in the ICT4Ag adoption process.
 
I also note something that seems to run across many discussions in government and private sector discourse, that agriculture seems to be taken to be a crop or agronomy focus rather than the wider crop and livestock focus. 
 
You seek my opinion on whether farmer organizations deal more with the private sector professional managers or with the extension agents from the state or the public sector. My experience, and the business model we employ ensures that extension and management of professional s in farmer organizations takes advantage of both the state agents support, who are more technically endowed than the management orientation of professional hires from the private sector. The state officers have a role in pulling government resources, through their payment and policy interventions that integrate into the farmer organizations and their value chains. The biggest contribution of the professional managers therefore has been in integrating the business dimension in their work with farmers. As indicated in my discussions, the value chain, and knowledge capture, provides space for interaction of all actors.
 
On the perspective of "filtering" of information to help growers create a symbiotic relationship with agricultural professional as doctors do, you cannot be more right. My own experience and practice has been to create community ICT and Knowledge Centers which we have dubbed Resource, Aquaculture, Value Addition and Knowledge (RAVAAK) Centers, our own model of telecentres or Community Informatics Centers. At the centers the knowledge gathering is two ways – from the communities to capturer indigenous knowledge and from the technical extension people to pass their knowledge to the community in what has been undisputed in this forum that sharing of information on a man-to-man perspective beats even ICTs, mobile or otherwise.
 
Your own or country’s work in capturing knowledge on what can be added to the information network of farmers is definitely very interesting. Early warning systems are not quite integrated in the current weather advisory to farmers which is an aspect of how well resourced the ICT4Ag developers need to link up with other actors in the infrastructure and knowledge layers. A lot is being done by Google and I suppose many others in creation of cloud based solutions that can provide the necessary integration to what people like yourself and your country are doing. With so much ubiquity in the internet, one wonders why a concerted joint effort among development actors in the ICT4Ag is not linking to create a single solution that helps the sector better.
 
In the coming sessions, I am sure we shall delve more into some of these challenges but yes…there is more learning that needs to be captured and stored to help the sector grow by capturing weather forecast that learns from its microclimate, sensors, remote sensing, data from field with digital uptake etc, to create data to optimize crop in-puts in management and technical decisions on the ‘when’, ‘what’, and ‘how’
 

e-Agriculture is the most fancy and hot issue but not a 'mandatory'' kind of issue for many development practitioners in developing countries. So we have not seen any significant global initiative to promote ICT usage in agriculture though developed countries already adopted all modern ICT facilities in agriculture sector. When in Bangladesh we are talking about basic ICT usage for extension, most of the developed countries are using sensor or sattelite image based ICT applications for agriculture.

Though e-Agricluture has been identified as one of the action lines identified in the Declaration and Plan of Action (2003) of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). The "Tunis Agenda for the Information Society," published on 18 November 2005, emphasizes the leading facilitating roles that UN agencies need to play in the implementation of the Geneva Plan of Action. FAO hosted the first e-Agriculture workshop in June 2006, bringing together representatives of leading development organizations involved in agriculture. The meeting served to initiate development of an effective process to engage as wide a range of stakeholders involved in e-Agriculture, and resulted wide spread discussion among various stakeholders on usage of ICT in agricultural sector. But in field, not much commendable progress achieved till now. 

e-Agriculture now needs leadership where FAO can take initiative jointly with other relevant stakeholders and Governments can implement with necessary customization. The major issues for next few years are -

1. Lack of National e-Agriculture strategies to guide and lead to a path

2. Capacity of the relevant organizations in terms of HR (Skill & Knowledge) and technology.

3. Committment of the government and development partners

4. Lack of coordination among the actors, even within government and development agencies

A global initiative to facilitate, support, monitor and mentor as global knowledge hub can be useful to overcome these challenges.

Resources are not the challenge rather utilization of the resources is the major challenge to introduce e-Agriculture.

Thanks,
Shahid

This is so critical and I wonder if it has been formally proved that the levels of trust actually interfere in the quality of the information captured.

So much of the farmers' business and daily dealings are face to face that answering questions in a cell phone or tablet may not have the same importance or relevance in their minds..... just a thought...

But in our case, as members of a value chain we have been working on building trust for many years now, this should "hopefully" help with the quality of the data we are capturing...