Kelly Wanda
| Organization type | Research Institution |
|---|---|
| Pays | Uganda |
This member participated in the following Forums
Forum Forum: "Strengthening Agricultural Marketing with ICT" December, 2011
Question 4: Market information - data on impact
Thanks Riggs,
And below TimKelly refers to more studies well. Probably there are many more and could this be one thing for Judy(USAID) to sort of track and store in this database? We could all contribute to help her?
I have also attached my e-mail and phone contact for networking.
+256-772-545563
Dear Jennaker and All,
Yes indeed impact assessments are crucial and would be very good to even sort of look into issues of sustainability and efficiency just to stretch it further. Here in Uganda, a mobile-based MIS was successfully piloted by IITA and Foodnet in 1999/2000. Qualitative results and even the results from this study showed that farm prices increased drastically and actually they have continued to be higher. The bargaining power of small holders went up due to this service.
These studies can be found via the following:
http://people.su.se/~daya0852/JEEA_Prices.pdf
http://people.su.se/~jsven/MIS100810.pdf
Question 3: Market information - sustainability
Dear All,
This is still a thorny issue here in LDCs. The majority of farmers are small-scale and are resource constrained. Given the liberalization and privatization, they need to compete in new ways for markets and its critical that they need to access market information especially price. Also, experience shows that these farmers are interested in increasing their incomes. Therefore, any MIS should aime to target these farmers.
The issue of sustainability given the large number of smallholders is quite an interesting one to pursue. There are opportunities for these services to build a stream of revenues.Whether these are enough to meet the costs of running the services is certainly the issue. In the short run this is not possible. Some have argued that even in the long run its not possible. However, I sort of see an opportunity to increase revenue but also reduce the costs of operation. Where this stops will also depend on the economic growth, the business acumen of the people running the service, and the partnerships involved.
There are many things that I believe have not been very well explored and yet can provide an insight into this subject. The biggest challenge trying to build a sustainable MIS is in collection of reliable and accurate data consistently. This is crucial in winning over users. As I said earlier on dissemination would not be a big problem as there can be many models built around this eg subscriptions, alerts, etc.
Also, data could be sold to other stakeholders that include banks, trade unions, students, etc. For students, it would be interesting to look beyond national boundries and target universities in the developed countries. I believe here there can be a big market in terms of students studying agriculture.
The above point also introduces an interesting issue - that of partnerships between foreign companies and local ones or even smart individuals who can market the services to users and at the same time work on the costs and collection/management efficiency.
Another model or approach that can reduce costs is decentralization. This basically would involve individuals operating on a small area that they know well by collecting information which they exchange with information from the outside world. They sell the information from outside to their areas and in turn collect and send information about their areas to partners.
MIS services are still not really attractive to the private sector when you look at current business environment. There is still need for public investment. However, there can be some opportunities for the private sector. The mobile phone is spreading fast in LDCs. On the other hand, the competition between mobile phone companies is stiff and they are currently looking for value added services. In here lies some opportunity if a partnership can be built with mobile companies. The trick would be that you would have to work with all mobile phone companies.
In short, there is need to conduct further research on this subject by first putting up a minimal MIS, identify strategic private and public partnerships, understand the costs of operation and then make a business plan to scale out the service. This has not been done in the past and I think needs to be done urgently.
Question 1: Market Information - users of mobile technology
The issue of which business model is still a challenge. However, Shaun has provided some interesting way forward - putting smart people from various stakeholder institutions together. Although it has been suggested that tech is not a problem, its also important to have a directory of people who can build smart applications and have them availed to companies in the developing world that need to try out smart ideas. I live in Uganda and getting smart builder of mobile applications that interface with the web is a challenge. Already the mobile revolution has provided an opportunity to build business in the sense that payments can be made in micro units by users. Revenues can easily be collected and monitored. We also see that given the stiff competition by mobile companies, they would be more that willing to partner with serious content providers and probably engage in promotion activities also, as the market their produce. However, this too has to be linked up with rural enterprise companies/NGOs that are going to facilitate marketing of farmer producers at competitive prices. The number of mobile users is growing very fast in Africa which is a great opportunity.
One other thing explaining the lack of a sustainable or working system today is that many MISs project were donor driven and during their lifetime, no serious attempts were made to sort of transit from public/donor to privately run and supported systems. There are many ideas today and what needs to be done is to sort of provide seed money to try them out with special focus on lessons learned and best practices, what works and what does not work in certain situations.
As we brainstorm on private sector involvment, we need also to remember the sort of market for this service which too provides some challenges. Ironically small rural farmers still have many issues to invest in to make their agriculture commercially competitive. On the other hand, most traders do have their systems of obtaining price information. The other market segment would be academics, NGOs and Government. Interestingly, Governments already invest some monies in this service in terms of hiring personnel etc. This provides some opportunity to tap into this resource and hence private-public partnership where Government would play a leading role in collection or monitoring while the private sector plays a major role in dissemination. There can also be the issue of having a semi-autonomous body doing this rather than having it within government or government can outsource this function. Indeed there can be many models that can be worked out and improved upon given the ICT revolution that has taken place.