Question 1 (opens 17 Sept.)

A dynamic firm in Ghana, Prep-eez, is currently building a national electronic extension platform, in collaboration with the government, that will allow information sharing between farmers, agricultural extension officers and agri experts via voice and SMS. The platform has two main components. A comprehensive e-knowledge management website where most of the agronomic content will be created by scientists and published on the portal for users such as field officers, farmer based organizations, NGOs, researchers and policy makers. The second component would involve transmitting relevant content from the knowledge management portal to smart phone enabled agricultural extension officers in the field, and from there to the farmers' mobile phones via voice and sms.

The IVR and audio component provides an opportunity to deliver critical content to farmers in local voice dialect, and the farmer also has the opportunity to contact the nearest extension officer or  call center for further support. It naturally involves the establishment of a call center to handle farmer queries for effective response. There will be regional  e-labs as well that would be expected to help develop extension officers and  farmer's e-learning skills.

Are there examples out there of successfully delivering content to farmers via voice?  

Dear Members,

I work for The Department for International Development (DFID) and I am also  a postgraduate student at Birkbeck, University of London, where I am completing a MSc. in International Business and Development. 

I am extremely interested in the near ubiquity of mobile phones, the massive growth of mobile networks in developing countries and the huge potential this has in closing information gaps between the developing world and the developed world and thus closing the agricultural productivity gap.

To this end, I am currently writing my dissertation on the socio-economic impact of mobile phones on smallholder farmers. As Agricultural, Development and ICT professionals and/ or users of mobile agricultural information services I would like to invite you to participate in a very short online survey that should take no longer than 5 minutes to complete:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NHMZTT5

All responses will remain anonymous and will be used for no other purpose than to either prove or disprove the hypothesis generated by my dissertation as arrived at by a comprehensive review of the literature on mobiles for development.

Please share with your networks,

You can also connect with me on twitter @mc37077442  or @m4dsurvey

Thank you

Kind regards

Hello

there are indeed quite a few successfull example of delivering content to farmer via voices. See e.g. lifeline agriculture india (http://lifelines-india.net/ ) and our related work (http://www.webfoundation.org/2012/02/vbat-lessons-and-future-steps/ ). There are also a few initiatives/projects using freedomfone (http://freedomfone.org/ )

Stephane

There is great potential in mobile phones as a means of relaying information or creating two way channel for information access. Considering the penetration rate of mobile phones especially most African countries, it becomes the most desired way to recieve and share information. A number of great areas have been discussed here already, here is my contribution:

Frontline SMS as a good number of you may already know is a great tool for SMS communication management and is freely available for download to service providers.

Twitter on feature phones is something Im thinking about recently and I see it as a very low cost means of sharing information within communities and groups of farmers and other groups. Twitter has SMS short codes for a number of countries which one can use to configure feature phones to recieve tweets as SMS.  If a telecentre/service provider/opinion leader are followed by special interest groups of community members such as famers, they can then tweet content which is then broadcasted to all the group members. Whats interesting is that only one person sending the tweet is charged and thats if he/she does it from their phones. In Kenya this would cost about USD 0.0125.

The limitation for SMS is ofcos the shortened information which may loose meaning, however for successful cases I have witnessed usually have content validators who are proffesionals in given fields such as Agriculture and can figure out if the SMS content developed makes sence or not.

Cheers!

Thank you for a wealth of information! Very much appeciated!

Hi dear colleagues

Here is a strong evidence that the mobile should be used to support AIS. These are the results of a study conducted in Egypt in 2010. 

Please note behind the results: the network used by farmers, the potentials of partnerships/relations that can be mediated, innovation players, types of information and media that can be used .. and more for your food for thoughts.

The study was conducted in seven extension centers allover the country in the governorates of: Ismaillia, Daquahlia, Kafr El-Shiekh, Fayoum, Assuit, Behira, and Nobaria Zone. These centers were selected randomly from the fifty centers connected to the Rural and Agriculture Development Communication Network (RADCON). All farmers visiting these centers during October and November 2009 and have a mobile phone (126 farmers) were personally interviewed using a pre-tested questionnaire. 

The main results of the study were as follows:

1. Percentage of farmers having high value mobiles with 6-8 specifications (40.6%) were close to those having low value mobiles with 1-3 specifications (46.9%).
2. The estimated value of farmers’ mobiles was not related to farmer's age, education, land holdings, or animal holdings, but was only correlated to the number of crops planted during the year, which means that farmers own a mobile for utilization and not to gain a status.
3. 87.3% of the respondents contact fertilizer dealers to know the prices, 80.2% contact their folks, relatives, and friends to solve an agricultural problem, 77.8% contact the extension worker for the same reason, and 77% and 75.4% contact seed and pesticide dealers to know the prices sequentially.
4. Solving agricultural problem represented 33.86% of respondents' usage of mobiles, knowing prices in general represented 28.2% of their usage, while knowing news, dates and places were 19.8%, 16.4%, and 7.67% sequentially.
5. Contacting folks, relatives, and friends for agricultural purposes rated to 46.97% call per month, meaning that one of each two of respondents’ calls were to exchange agricultural information or issue.
6. Cooperative contacts by farmers rated to 19.83 calls per month, and 16.3% calls to the extension agent, followed by fertilizer, pesticide and seeds dealers.
7. The source of 34.2% calls received by farmers were relatives, other farmers, friends, and folks, and 14.3% extensionists and agronomists, while 10.3% crop, animal, fertilizer and fodder dealers.
8. 20.6% of respondents’ calls were for exchanging news and advice, 9.5% to solve a problem and information exchange, 7.9% to announce meetings date, and 7.9% to purchase crops.
9. Farmers prefer to know the weather condition daily or seasonally, best practices or recommendations monthly or seasonally, diagnoses and treatment information weekly, monthly or seasonally, new varieties and selling places seasonally, irrigation advise and market prices monthly or seasonally.
10. Respondents equally preferred to ask for weather information and to be sending to them, while those who preferred to ask for other agricultural information were double the number of who preferred to receive it regularly.
11. Short Message (SMS) were highly preferred by farmers to receive information, followed by voice calls, and then images and video for diagnoses and treatment information.

PS. There are 3 mobile companies in Egypt. A SIM card can cost $ 0.16 to 0.48. A minute of voice call $ 0.0225. A mobile set from $ 10 to 500.

PPS. Taking advantage of this by extension service is ongoing.

This is very informative thank you!

This is a really interesting study . . . following on from that, mobile network operators are waking up to the market potential of supplying farmers with value added services and information via mobile.

Take a look at the "Connected Agriculture" report released by Vodafone and Accenture in 2011. The report determined that 80% of the potential $138 billion addition to farmers' incomes will come from:

• mobile payment systems like M-PESA that provide farmers with the ability to exchange capital;
• mobile information services that give access to critical, targeted information on commodity prices, weather, disease outbreaks, etc.; and 
• helpline services providing key ag tips and real-time advice.

Check out more about this particular study at:

http://www.vodafone.com/content/index/media/news/connected_agriculture.html

In September 2012, Airtel and GSMA mFarmer initiative announced a partnership to launch the 'Sauti ya Mkulima' project to provide 250,000 farmers in Kenya with agric info over mobile. The project seeks to provide farmers with agricultural information and advice, but also aims to create a farmer community where producers can exchange with each other about experiences, social events, and business opportunities. For more details on the project, take a look at the press release at:  http://www.airtel.com

When considering what ICT innovations should be used with farmers, I always try to answer some key questions first.

• What types of information do they need? Our surveys throughout Africa have shown that farmers are interested in receiving information on prices, weather forecasts, information on where to find inputs, agricultural tips and best practices, disease and pest outbreaks, information on volumes of commodities in markets, and access to buyers.

• What technology do the farmers have access to? What is the infrastructural lay of the land? In most rural areas of Africa where Esoko works, the technology available to farmers is typically not the Internet or even smartphones. However, most farmers either have a mobile phone themselves or know someone who has access to a mobile phone.

• Next I ask what are the skill levels of the farmers using the technology? Are they literate? Do they know how to use SMS or only how to make voice calls?

At Esoko, we are exploring a variety of different technical options to supply farmers at all skill levels with the information they need   . . . from a more sophisticated farm leader who uses a smart phone to do business to a smallholder who owns a mobile but cannot read. Therefore, we try to ensure many different channels are available, including SMS, VoiceSMS, IVR where the farmer can call and get information from an automated system, and an agricultural helpline where a team of experts respond to farmers’ requests for advice. 

Rich discussion and postings shows that variety of ICT innovations are happening around the globe...

Are there any ICT innovations designed around (entire) agricultural value chain? if so how it works?