Question 1: Market Information - users of mobile technology

The ARD-Infodev team in the World Bank is delighted to join forces with e-Agriculture to engage in a series of discussions on how to improve small farmer access and use of services facilitated by ICT. Recent years have shown an increase in the need and interest by our partners in client countries to explore ICTs in agriculture. 

To respond, we pooled together the ICT in Agriculture Sourcebook containing over 200 specific case studies and good or promising practices across different sub-sectors in agriculture. While doing this work we realized how fast moving this field is, and how much knowledge and experience there already exists. We are looking forward to our exchanges and your inputs and comments during the coming 2 weeks on the theme of small farmer access to markets.

I believe that all categories/types of smallholder  - low, middle or high-tech farmers use and benefit directly or indirectly from market information through ICTs. But the question we are trying to address is the viable, sustainable and financially scalable deployments of ICTs in to these areas for agricultural development.

These factors are most of the time, only considered from the service providers' side - telecom company or agricultural partners. When we look at viability, sustainability and scalability of these projects from the smallholder farmers' side, we actually need to know what percentage is low, middle or high-tech to use ICTs for market information.

The percentage of these smallholder farmers to profitably use ICTs/mobile technologies is very low at this stage of ICTs innovation. The majority (low and middle-tech) is still trying to survive with their farm products and will use any means to avoid incurring market information cost in order to break-even. This is because the value of these services to them iis still vague.

So public-private partnerships (PPP) could help beef-up the campaign for quick adoption and use of these technologies to improve the living conditions of the farmers as well as ensuring the survival of the service providers. For example, piloting with toll-free calls at some areas to encourage farmers to call and seek market information (pull) or automatic sms to interested farmers about specific market information (push) could be used through PPP. While these services could be structured to benefit farmers according to their levels of production, opening it up to all could also lead to increase use.

Again, my argument is based on the fact that we have spoon-fed these farmers for such a long time with 'AID' and suddenly switching to business, could cost both - the farmers and the service providers.

Ben

Dear All,

In industrialised countries the average farmer has access to hundres of sites where they can access information about their market opportunities.  Producers have a host of service providers vying for their business..... and in doing so they deluge people with facts, figures and forecasts on the market.... This information wall has gone into hyper drive with the advent of ICT's.....

Why are they doing this? no brainer business thrives on information.  As has been noted by the previous writers, if you ask a farmer what they would like in terms of information they will ask for a wide range of topics.....  But what is the first thing that most farmers really want to know? 

I think its price first ! Having access to a reliable source of current price information is extremely valuable in making sales decisions and production decisions.  There is a lot more... but we don't have that yet????

Despite all the public investments in agriculture, the thriving private sector there are few emerging economy countries with really good basic price information services...  and yet we have access to a mesmerising range of technologies that could solve this issue.

As Judy has said, the Business model for supplying market information services (MIS) is a challenge, but there are many ways to make an omelette. 

I think we need to starting focusing.  I think we need to bring together clusters of smart people, from companies, banks, telecomes, Gov, civil society in some target countries, and work on using the ICT revolution to help us support some of the new ideas that are emerging in the MIS world.. 

There are already some very interesting ideas out there, i think we need to focus on integrating MIS into our investment DNA....  Where would you start????

 

Let me share some of my expereince in working for a project called Katalyst (www.katalyst.com.bd). We have been working with the two largest telecom operators in our country, (Telenor and Orascom) to deploy two ICT based platforms targeting farmers. One is a telecenter led model and working with the mobile phone company we have succussfully launched 500 such ICT center acrosss the whole of Bangladesh. These center serve rural audience including farmers with range of service including agriculture informations; these center have been running commerically for the last 4 years. The other model is an agriculture helpline which is hosted by human agents, under a call center and operated by the telco itself as a value added service. This too has been running on its own since 2009 and has registered more than million phone call todate. (Although having human agents is more costly we had found from our research that farmers are reluctant to interact with IVR and SMS). To make the whole model more sustainable, instead of the project supplying agro contents, we have identified and developed ICT based agro content provider who have commerical agreeement with these telcos. Subsequent Impact measurement (which itself comes with a lot of challenges and was the subject area of our recent online collaboration with e-agriculture: http://www.e-agriculture.org/content/policy-brief-challenges-and-opportunities-capturing-impact-ict-initiatives-agriculture) has so far shown a significant number of farmers have benefitted in terms of better disease prevention, new cultivation techniques, better information on inputs etc.

We have tried to work with market price information but frankly speaking that has proven to be quite difficult. First of all, thanks to the high mobile reach, farmers do get to know the market price of different markets, however owing to logistical issues, they are unable to tap into these opporutnities. Second, market price is so fluctuating and different across different markets, credibility is an issue. We have had some success with a local software platform that was developed called cellbazaar (which allows sellers to post 'sell' information through phone) but i guess more work could be done here.

 

FYI- I am posting my post in two parts, but they are all part of the same comment thread.

I have spent the past year working on the ICT sourcebook with the World Bank and am delighted to see pertinent issues raised in regards to the "how". Market-- and as Shaun said, price--information is certainly one of the most, if not the most, critical and up-and-coming agriculture service provided through mobile phones. The problem that we all seem to agree on--making market information services sustainable and accurate--appears to be the main challenge. It seems that many of the projects we hear about are "boutique" pilot studies... While indeed useful to gain information on what works and what doesn't, scaling is a hurdle that only a few seem to be clearing.

I think Judy's point and her comment about USAID's is useful. Focusing on farmers' associations increases demand for services and builds up a critical mass, making the service more appealing for private and public sector involvement/investment.

I also agree with Ben's point in that switching from donor-led initiatives to business-oriented often does not work. Farmers may be hesitant (or simply unable) to pay for services after they've been subsidized for some time. However, if we examine the economics of farmers' situations and attempt to offer a service that increases their profits, they have more incentives to pay for them. Tiered payment systems may work in areas where farmers have varying "ability to pay" such as different levels of income, distance to markets, and types of production.

As a consultant with the Gender and Rural Development team at the World Bank, I wanted to post a response to the main thread which also addresses many of the very pointed and important components already raised by other participants while including the input of gender mainstreaming.  I think this is a direct link to Ben's call for viable, sustainable and scalable intiatives.  If providing technologies to small holders is difficult in general, it is even more so in the case of rural women, who often lack access to basic technolgies such as wheelbarrows, let alone more advanced electronics.  There is a basic rub here in that often times those who stand to benefit the most (e.g. overall impacts of even marginal increases in income) are also those most at risk of being excluded: exclusion and information-gaps can be self perpetuating.

There is a continued need to reinforce the notion that agricultural development is not gender neutral.  Two examples from the Gender in Agriculture Sourcebook come to mind.

The Warana Wired Village Project in India failed to include women when it linked 70 villages through Kiosks which housed computers and printers.  Women were not encouraged to utilize these resources which resulted in the poorest, landless labors being exluded and a widening of the digital-literacy gap between men and women.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the Grand Coast Fishing Operators' Union in Senegal (a womens-based union) has created a network which utilizes ICTs to share price information among 7,500 users to promote their produce, monitor export markets, and even negotiate prices with overseas buyers before they arrive in Senegal.  By recognizing those areas wherein women play a major role along the fishing value chain, this project was able to collectively benefit a large number of people - both women and men.

ICT is one of these great areas which, in my opinion, has true potential to really impact development through some very simple and cost-effective measures.  The speed at which these potential impacts can grow needs to be properly addressed as well (assuring benefits for those working from a disadvantaged technology vantage point).  I think one of the most basic steps practioners can take to address these concerns is to simply expand the dialogue from rural smallholders to rural women and men smallholders.

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Based on Reuters Market Light's experience of providing agri information (market prices, localized weather forecasts, personalized crop advisory and agri news) in India, the answers to some of the often asked questions on the topic are as under:

 

 *   How do farmers use the phone to access information(SMS, voice-based response, phone calls)?

Answer: farmers seem to prefer SMS in local language since it can be easily retrieved, accessed as and when required and shared with other contacts. Voice message is preferred amongst illiterate farmers, though there are an increasing number of cases where illiterate farmers take the help of their family members (e.g. their children) for reading text smses.

 

*       What types of farmers use the technology?

Answer - Paid services are often accessed by comparatively well-off farmers. Besides having the ability to pay for the same, one key reasons for this is the fact that such farmers are often the early adopters of new technology. Also younger farmers have shown more inclination to accept this medium of information (mobile phones) than older farmers. 

 

Regards,

Rantej Singh

 

This is another good example in Kenya; http://technology.cgap.org/2009/09/08/understanding-what-drives-profits…

I appreciate very much the insight written by Shahidi,  and I add that the Bangladesh case related to the effects of mobile phone on the agriculture information is somewhere similar with the current situation in Burundi.

Nevertheless, traders as well as farmers of Burundi do not have an unique platform of sharing agriculture information like e-Krishok of Bangladesh, many traders of Burundi get information about the highness of production in agriculture  and they do not reduce consequently the price and it has been seen that each storekeeper of Burundi keeps information for himself and he knows how to pay in secret to its providers before asking them to do not reveal the real price. It means that the information exchanged through cell phone belongs to the receptor who could use these information for its own speculations.  Before the civil war, the national daily news of Burundi “Le Renouveau ” used to publish agriculture information related to the availability on the market of some agriculture products like beans or rice consumed regularly in Burundi, but nowadays, such information are not available anywhere even online or through cell phone. I think that a strong partnership public-private is needed for supporting farmers in sharing information and for collecting and publishing through cell phones the daily data related to the agriculture information. Indeed, I try to believe that openness of market in the agriculture sector is reliable to the right information exchanged among the storekeepers and farmers, also these  right information could incite the investments in the agriculture sector where it is remarkable  that the agriculture sector is held by poor population who could not innovate or extend the space of their fields in order to increase the volume of the production and accordingly to reduce the price instead of reflecting inflation which displays the lack of food stock, so I do not expect great thing of the only current proliferation of mobile phone in Burundi in favour of what I call “ manipulation through cell phone” instead of bringing right information among farmers or storekeepers as I wrote it  in another forum of e-agriculture published in French language on the link below : www.e-agriculture.org/forumtopics/question-3-lundi-23-mai   Prof Antoine Kantiza, Master Uticef,-