Question 1 (opens 12 Nov.)

Thank you Alice. You make good points from your experience about the importance of planning for technology to be sustainable, as well as the need to avoid creating greater inequity.

In question 3 we will look specifically at the role of the public sector in supporting producer organization's uptake of ICT. Question 4 will look at the possibility of expanding the "digital divide". Please stay with the discussion!

Hello everyone,

An interesting example on how ICTs are being used by producer organizations is the experience of the Zambia Honey Council (ZHC) as reported by CIFOR. Zambia is the top exporter of honey in southern Africa. The honey is primarily produced and harvested in rural areas far from buyers and markets, which complicates selling. ZHC was created in response to this limitation, to develop capacities of honey producers. ZHC is also part of the Zambia Honey Partnership, which includes government agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), business and trade associations, beekeepers, exporters/packers, researchers and international development agencies, all supporting the honey industry.

Members of ZHC can benefit from training modules on best field practices in honey production, bulking centres established in honey-producing districts, and the dissemination of information via mobile phones. This last service provides information on potential buyers and their prices by SMS, thereby promoting informed bargaining by the producer organizations. This SMS marketing system allows access to information on individual and collective buyers and specific information on the type of honey buyers are looking for.

As a result, negotiation of prices and quantities can be done directly between producers and buyers, instead of being shared from one producer to another, making the information more accurate and the marketing more efficient. The use of the SMS service has allowed producer organizations new marketing possibilities, which ultimately improves their sells and income.

You can read more about this experience here

Hello Andrea,

I find your example of ICT as a marketing tool for honey producers to be quite interesting.  The example seems to point out one thing - ICT can enable producers to exercise more control over operations.  Operations that used to be handled by different divisions with different responsibilities could therefore be streamlined or centralized attributing more accountability to the producer organization.  Simply put, with ICT, producer organizations have nobody else to blame for mistakes or to praise for successes but themselves. 

Following up on Andrea's post, I was actually just out in Zambia a few weeks ago conducting a workshop for 12 different local agribusinesses on how to use low-cost video to create their own extension videos. One of those businesses was a honey producer. Through a partnership with Cisco, we were able to pass along free Flip cameras to each company to get them started--although some many end up investing in slightly more robust equipment as well.

We should know within the next six months how many of these agribusinesses have been able to develop their own videos and to what extent they are achieving their objectives of improving the sharing of best practices with farmers.

This workshop--and others like it that I have facilitated in Kenya, Mozambique, Ghana, and Senegal--are funded by a USAID project (FACET) and structured around a toolkit I wrote on the subject entitled Integrating Low-Cost Video into Agricultural Development Projects: A Toolkit for Practitioners, which can be found online at http://www.ictforag.org/video.

Unrelated to this response, but also potentially of interest, we also just released a second toolkit focused on radio entitled Interactive Radio for Agricultural Development Projects: A Toolkit for Practitioners, which is online at http://www.ictforag.org/radio.

A very interesting example Andrea. ZHC seems to integrate all the key actors of the honey supply chain from producers to retailers, including packers etc... It seems that ITC is very helpfull for ZHC to deliver the services demanded by the members. 

How old is ZHC and who is financing it?  

Hi Pierre, 

The Zambia Honey Council was formed in 2003, and the partners of this initiative are Hivos, The Swedish Cooperation Centre and the Embassy of Finland.  

More information is also available in their website: http://www.zambiahoneycouncil.org.zm/

Hi Everyone! Reading through the posts and the cases presented, ICT is still a tool, a means to an end, an effective way of connecting people, enabling them to work together to help address or resolve problems, and of course be updated of what's happening outside their community.

One case that I can share is the experience of the Panglima Laot, a network of local fisher associations, in Aceh, Indonesia. When Aceh was struck by a tsunami in 2004, fishers became unaware of what areas became hazardous and areas where it's safe for them to fish. Through an ADB-assisted project, the fishers were trained in using GPS. By combining the GPS results with their local knowledge, they were able to generate updated navigational maps. The maps identified 3 previously unmapped areas, 4 unmapped geological faults, and several unknown coral areas. The updated maps made their fishing more accurate, prevented damage to their nets, saved fuel by going directly to the fishing grounds, and saved lives when in one incident, the captain and his crew were able to radio their positions during an emergency and the rescuers got to know their exact position from the updated navigational maps:  http://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/pub/2009/Mapping-the-Sea.pdf

ICT is indeed a powerful tool, but the power really lies on how people's capacities are enhanced and how they are able to use this tool to improve their lives.

Hi Leah, this is interesting. It would be helpful to know if the process became part of their regular activity after the post-tsunami funds finished. Do you know if the fishers association is still using GIS or other ICT tools for mapping or other functions today?

Hi, just wanted to share a project brief I came across which highlights the experiences of Advancing Capacity to Support Climate Change Adaptation (ACCA) project in communicating climate risks from 10 pilots in Africa and 5 pilots in Asia. The project aims to address the need to develop appropriate risk communication strategies that can support the decision-making processes of stakeholders for climate change adaptation. The experiences identified the importance of determining local context for decision making prior to identifying information needs and designing appropriate communication strategies, promoting social learning between project staff and stakeholders, maintaining continuous dialogues between policy makers and local communities, sustaining active interaction and learning-by-doing to foster comprehension, and communicating clear and relevant climate adaptation messages.

The cases presented in the brief showed that some communication tools were found effective in communicating climate adaptation risks in specific countries. In the Philippines, for example, the use of posters, project magazines, newspaper articles, tv and radio broadcasts, peer-reviewed articles, group discussions, and videos were found effective in communicating key messages on climate change and creating positive effects both at the local and national levels. (http://start.org/download/publications/accca09-web.pdf)

Here's an interesting case that is somewhat related to your posts on people as key in the effective use of ICT and how in some cases traditional modes of information exchange still prove to be (more) viable.

With ICT literacy a persistent challenge particularly among smallholder farmers, an approach that has been proven to be effective by a farmer in Kenya is the combination of traditional and ICT tools in disseminating useful agricultural information to the smallholder farmers in his community.

For Kenyan farmer, Zack Matere, it all started when he found a solution to a strange disease that attacked his potatoes by googling it on the Internet. Recognizing that many other farmers in his area may not be literate in or have access to the technology, he invested in a 3G-enabled phone and decided to become the bridge between these farmers and the internet. Zack sources agricultural-related information, including details on how to make crops flourish, farming methods or market opportunities, translates the information into the local language, and posts this as posters on notice boards that he hangs in public places.

Using his phone camera, he has taken photos of encroachers in a nearby forest, a major water catchment area in Kenya, and posted pictures of the encroachers on Facebook. He also presented his photographic evidence, to a NGO that eventually decided to build a security fence round the water catchment area. Zack has now started a pilot fish-farming project on the back of government funding and using a computer donated by a NGO, and linked to the internet via GPRS, farmers working on the project monitor satellite images of the constituency’s fishponds. The center also serves as a resource center where farmers gather to find information on various aspects of fish farming.

The case of being able to use mobile phones to capture incidents of encroachment also shows how farmers can become data collectors at the local level through mobile technology. With proper incentives to encourage reliability, data can then be used by mobile phone providers as information service to other farmers in the form of alerts, for example.

(Source: ICT Update, August 2012)