Question 3 (opens 2 Dec.) What is necessary to ensure ensuring that rural youth, women, the poorest...

When an agribusiness enterprise is mapped to act as the linkage to the market for agricultural produce, superimposing ICT solutions at all layers of the chain engages youth, women and men alike. Backed by this thinking, I want to submit that the biggest challenge in agriculture is our addressing the sector as distinct operational silos and not a continuum.

This view may call for reason to be excused as someone who has listened to me many times told me that I tend to sound like a carpenter whose tool in trade is a hammer, and believes that the problem is always a nail. My effort to integrate the value chain may seem to make me that proverbial carpenter but I have always contested that much as I use it as the basis of explaining my thinking, I always seek to contextualize my discourse.

That said; my experience in the daily sector has been to integrate our basic ICT solution to agriculture which is the digital hand held scale into farmer owned agribusiness initiatives. My contention is that the choice of ICTs, that have no domicile, alienates producers. Creating a physical space where knowledge is shared on a one on one basis promotes understanding. Having the sharing backed by the internet or other local computer or video solutions as has been noted in the model of the acclaimed digital green business model presents a home grown solution.

With the agribusiness organizational model housed in a digital centre that links the produce aggregated at the centre for economies of scale in volume aggregation for marketing helps in joint marketing and payment.

Our dairy sector experience has been that the knowledge centre which we have come to dub the Resource, Aquaculture, Value Addition, Agribusiness and Knowledge (RAVAAK) Centre engages women, youth, and men. This is what we did in the dairy sector and can be used in all value chains.

While women and youth are the labor in the farm and all wealth goes to the owner of the household resources who is the man, creating an agribusiness enterprise as a cooperative for aggregating agricultural produce and marketing can also have other businesses associated with it. We have formed a savings and credit cooperative as the arm for paying the farmers and we have also integrated retail outlets also owned by the producer and marketing cooperative. What this means is that the family uses the produce to procure for their household needs whether or not they have money, so long as they have the produce delivered to the cooperative to guarantee their payment for the credit. The cooperative Savings and Credit Cooperative (SACCO) also issues cheques in its name for producers who have a need to pay for anything on the strength of their produce.

In essence, the foregoing ensures that the family members that are authorized can take goods and make payments on credit and therefore are not alienated from their productivity outcomes. This then means that using the digital scale to capture produce weight, process the data for payment from the digital scale using a youth developed agribusiness ERP, run their organization using the same ERP, relay information on payments and credits using SMS and make payments using mPayment of the balance that has not been consumed through credit, we have a totally integrated ICT solution that ensures that women, youth and men are all actors in the value chain. Since the men only take what remains, the role of the ICTs to promote transparency and effectiveness makes it possible for women and men to share transparently and using societal pressure as the tool to ensure that men even they are pig headed in their houses are reminded in public gatherings the gains the cooperative is achieving in social development.

In a nutshell, it is necessary to combine the power of ICTs with organizational or business modeling to ensure gender equity or parity and to make youth actors through ICTs solution development and service provision from the knowledge end.

Kiringai