Question 1: ICTs for collecting agricultural, socio-economic, or M&E data (Open 11 June)
Question 1: Collecting data the conventional way (through paper and pen) is time-consuming, costly, and difficult to manage. However, digitization and increases in connectivity have created opportunities to improve these processes.
What types of ICT applications or devices are available for collecting agricultural, socio-economic, or M&E data in remote locations? How can you use them?
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One solution for converting paper data to digitial you may want to consider is: http://captricity.com/
As for backend data management, the best choice will depend upon your organizations particular needs, technology capabilities, and constraints. Can you provide more information to help address this question?
Diverting fertilizer meant for smallholder farmers by market forces has been major source of smallholder agricultural failure in sub-sahara west Africa, particularly in Northern Nigeria. Thanks to the apparition of ICT devices notably mobile phone and iPad. In a recent episode in Kano state where government revived a local public fertilizer (NPK) blending company (KASCO) that is in full production now. Priority is given to supplying smallholder farmers in the state's numerous local government areas with the fertilizer at 62% subsidy. But the critical factor is ensuring that intended vulnerable smallholder farmers really get the fertilizer consignment intended for them.
The fertilizer factory locates in the state headquarter (Kano) and delivery is made to community wards across the state where some wards are up to one hour journey from Kano. Serveral monitoring measures have been employed including trailer escort from the factory; delivery feedback note, public radio announcement regarding despatch and collector from the factory on daily basis. Almost half way through supplying the 484 wards each with a trailer fertilizer load for the smallholder farmers, a mobile phone call communicated fertilizer illigal deal in one of the wards. The phone reported illigal sales of the fertilizer at a market stall not intended originally for off loading the consignment.
The mobile alert went straight to the local police station that later on report to the supply source. The critical point of the mobile significance is the point where official monitoring of the fertilizer ended with off-loading with properly signed delivery feed note (DFN). iPad imaging of the affected fertilizer and the market stall completed the full story for reporting to the higher authorities for correction. It appears that within the remote smallholder local ICT context, mobile phone and iPad duo holds significant promises for simple yet effective means of achieving inputs distribution monitoring for improved smallholder farmers livelihoods.
ICT covers any product that will store, retrieve, manipulate, transmit or receive information electronically in a digital form. For example, personal computers, digital television, email, robots.
The Digital Purjee Information Service via SMS ensures both timely harvest and enhanced income for farmers and consistent supply of raw materials for sugar mills. This is a result of a joint initiative between the UNDP-supported Access to Information (A2I) Programme, set up by the Prime Minister's Office, and Bangladesh Sugar and Food Industries Corporation of the Ministry of Industries.
How do you work the M&E with farmers? Because it is very interesting to see the use of text messages and Ipod, but we collect data and more by the technician team, what happend with farmers? do we transfer this new technology to them? are they set to work with this after we have gone with our projects?
Let me know your thoughts,
Pablo
Pablo, I agree with your question about whether projects are sustainable after the funding has finished and the staff have left. Something important to consider is how to utilise technology already in the hands of farmers - avoiding the challenges of maintaining new technology if it breaks down or sustains a cost. Its important to consider capacity building in terms of what resources it takes to run a project - an information advice system for example - to make sure it has potential for longevity and draws on support which is available.
Check out this CAHNET project which set up a livestock information system in Eastern Africa, including data collection and surveying. It relies on basic mobiles already in the hands of beneficiaries who are able to take part via SMS.
Another point is what incentivises people to access these services? As @Arjen points out some SMS short codes can be organised to be free for communities to text, but what about those which require farmers to spend some (often limited) disposable income to participate. For us this comes down to offering information which has a transformative impact, such as market price information which can save time, money and even lives. Here's some examples: Fishing in Indonesia, Cashews in Cote d'Ivoire, Potatoes in Argentina and advice from farmer to farmer in El Salvador
Very interesting, I will try to contact with the people from El Salvador to see what we can work in the area that we cover.
Regards,
First, thank you for organizing this "online forum".
We, at SmartAgro, saw an opportunity in the arrival of “low-cost’’ smartphone and the advantages they bring as compare to regular mobile phone. The GPS allows to measure and localize a field, the camera to take observational pictures and you can collect data ‘offline’ (which is interesting when, in remote areas, no network is available) .
Implementing a project based on smartphones and make it a scalable solution is obviously harder than with SMS based services. But some projects like the Community Knowledge Worker Initiative or the mFisheries project have already shown some interesting signs of success.
SmartAgro is a smartphone application that allows farmers or agronomic experts to collect in real time data about the field (type of products, operations carried out on the field, use of inputs, quality of soil, inventory of tools and machines, pictures of diseases on the crop…). We did a lot of effort on the design of the App to make it easy to use, even by people not familiar with new technologies or illiterates.
The data can then be synchronized on a computer (which can be shared or personal) on which the farmers can see an historical report of his operations, communicate with other stakeholders and access content send by NGOs or experts, and reply to call for tender published by buyers.
Finally a Web app allows NGOs, public and private organizations to interact with the farmers, send them information on the best farming practices, weather forecast et.
We are currently based in Chile and several agricultural organizations want to implement the solution to better understand the farmers needs, track the spreading of diseases and send them advice on best farming practices. The interesting thing is that those organizations are often ready to buy smartphones to farmers as they think such a solution could greatly improve the way they work and save money at the end.
What are your thoughts on solution based on smartphone? I agree with @laura when she says it is important to utilise technology already in the hands of farmers, but I think both type of projects should be developed at the same time .
For the people interested you can see a demo of the prototype here: https://vimeo.com/43577313 or get in touch with me, I’ll be happy to tell you more about it and hear about your experience !
twitter: @TomGrp
Hi everyone,
It is a pleasure to take part in this virtual event!
I thought I would outline the solution we have built to address real-time data collection and analytics but first I wanted to provide some context as to the problem we were trying to solve when be launched our first data collection solution in 2010 and have since iterated it many times as we learned along the way.
The social impact we set out to achieve was to help transform the economic lives of the world's most impoverished farmers by providing them with on-demand agricultural extention information and also create a stronger link between what was happening in field vs what was happening in the agricultural research institutions.
Furthermore, we saw data and data collection as a way to cross-subsidize keeping the outbound ag information free of charge. After all, well heeled people do not feel like they are paying for a Google Search because the adwords business model pays for your attention. In our case, the contract with the local communities is as follows: we will provide ag extension information in return for your time spent answering surveys.
To date 800+ Community Knowledge Workers (CKWs) or village level info-mediaries have all been trained as enumerators in Uganda and have collected more than 38,000 surveys (see our dashboard). They are also flanked by data validators who back-check and cross check their work. Furthermore 64% of our our CKWs earn less than 1.25 USD per day and thus this work provides them with a meaningful source of income - essentiallly a business in their pockets.
The technology soution is part of our 'Africa in the Cloud' vision and thus we have built our data collection toolkit into salesforce.com and put alot of effort into making complex survey creation (with skips and repeats) easy to create for a non-technical M&E people.
We also worked to optimize the smartphone application (based upon ODK) to work in 'last mile' conditions in which our CKWs live, namely off the grid - both power and network. And we worked hard to build GPS into the background, made photo capture easy and integrated our progress out poverty (PPI) index into the registration forms such that we can ensure that we and our partners can meet their social performance goals.
What we noticed along the way was that many other organization that are trying to reach last mile communities faced the same challenges of getting real-time data to help further their organizational missions and thus we began to offer our software as a service solution to other organizations. Today, organization in Uganda, Kenya and Columbia are also benefiting from these tools including organizations who are not agriculture specific.
But I think the most exciting part of this journey has been our most recent efforts to understand how 'big data' could be used to not only help strengthen the ag extention system but also be used to help small holder farmers access credit, inputs and even provide insights to macro-economic analysts who are deciding on large scale investments into the ag sector.
We recently worked with a NASA data miner to dive into our data. We found rich data about the meeting behaviour patterns with farmers. We also worked with Palantir to look into how we can use ag information queries to identify crop and animal disease outbreaks by using heatmaps on particular disease queries (below is a visual representation of the CKW data set - also see a video on this from the following link).
With the above insights we can begin to become proactive in our information campaigns. Now that we have built a call center, integrated our systems with community radio and have local partners (including the national ag extention service) in all districts where operate, we have the potential to actually use 'big data' in real-time to alleviate the potential for massive crop and animal disasters by alerting farmers to the risk and helping to take action.
A recent, differences in difference study showed that our famers in Eastern Uganda are increasing their knowledge of ag extension information and are also receiving 17% higher maize prices when compare to those who do not have access to CKWs.
The data is telling us that indeed knowledge is power. So where else can we use 'big data' to solve some of the world's most pressing problems?
Sean - You mentioned integrating Salesforce.com into your platform. Can you provide additional information about how you are using Salesforce.com and why you chose this option? Also, what is the cost for using Salesforce.com in this manner?