Bulbul I agree with your observations. In particular item 2 has been a major issue. Research findings on projects have suggested that farmers may not trust information they get from someone who they do not know. In our project (http://linux.odi.org.uk/eservblog) the advice is coming from an agricultural advisor who is employed by the farmer owned co-operative. This means that the farmer knows the person who is giving the advice and has more reason to trust him.

[quote=Alexander G. Flor]I'd like to repond to Michael's question using one of the more simpler methods in anticipatory research or future studies, i.e., scenario construction. To me the best case scenario for the use of mobile telephony in the rural areas is one wherein user-generated multimedia content on local and indigenous knowledge is shared and reused among user networks or communities through their mobile devices. A mobile device that captures audio-video of processing aren chips in Central Java is also used to upload the content to a YouTube site to be downloaded by rural housewives in East Java. The same device is used to download market information such as the current demand for processed aren chips in Singapore and current wholesale prices. The same mobile device is used to contact buyers and schedule transport from Surabaya to Jakarta and ultimately to Singapore. All of these mobile telephony services coming at rock bottom prices similar to how SMS costs nowadays.[/quote] This is an inspiring vision, but I think we should be realistic about the challenge of such complex information handling practices. Most particularly, the search cost of finding and selecting the relevant information from the rich plethora of content that is out there. There is a big difference between information being available and information being findable. Often, we rely on personal recommendations, or perhaps on-line 'recommendation communities' to help us guide our attention towards things of value. For this reason, I think our vision needs to think about how mobile telephony is integrated with existing networks, organisations, and information handling practices. In the meantime, you may find the results of the storybank project: www.cs.swan.ac.uk/storybank/ of interest. They have been experimenting with story sharing on mobile phones within one village.

My biggest concern is that the technology solutions should be led by people's needs on the ground. As long as technology design is left in the hands of the multinationals, they will design tools and services that generate profit for the multinational, and provide some value to individual users who can afford them (i.e. those with money & power already). The novel solutions that have been discussed here involve innovation on-site, responding to local conditions and priorities, and engaging communities in designing new information handling practices. If we want to see more of this, then we need to develop the capacity of local community based organisations and NGOs to design, adapt and innovate with the new communications technologies (and practices) for themselves.

[quote=harsha de silva] As an economist and a student of agricultural market efficiencies, I believe the future is to use ICTs [here mainly mobile telephony] to reduce information search costs in the agriculture value chain and to link the decision to grow with that of to sell. We at LIRNEasia did some preliminary work to understand the cost of information search for a group of small scale vegetable farmers in a district of Sri Lanka; from the point of making the decision to grow X or Y and selling the crop at the wholesale market. [Obviously the chain then moves along from there; adding value and final product at the retail level but we did not look at that.]. A draft report is available at [url]http://lirneasia.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/transactioncosts.pdf[/u…] We found that information search costs [here a part of transaction costs] was 11% of the total costs. Think about it; it is very high [it could be much higher in really rural areas]. Digging deeper we found that the distribution of these costs were skewed towards the decision to grow X or Y and to the decision to sell the resulting crop. [/quote] Harsha: Did you look at the economics of information about care / treatment of crops? The cost / availability of information about a crop must surely have an impact on the risk associated with the X vs. Y choice.

[quote=Helene]Hi Andy, Your project sounds very interesting indeed. Can you please link us to documents about it? Where are you piloting this? Do you have plans for scaling? [/quote] there is some basic information at http://linux.odi.org.uk/eservblog The work is being piloted with the Sironj Crop Producers' Company Ltd (Sironj block, Madhya Pradesh, India), and the technology has been developed in collaboration with them. We are currently looking for funding to scale the project and have some collaborators in India interested in taking that forwards, but we would be happy to talk to others about the potential of this technology in different settings.

[quote=Christian Kreutz]First of all I wonder whether it is all useful to focus on the mobile phone itself to measure impact? Isn't the mobile phone just an mean for another end? Wasn't that the mistake done by older ICT4D projects to expect technology will solve itself something? [/quote] I think Christian is getting at an important point here. I am not convinced the 'mobile phone' is the best unit of analysis for measuring the impact of interventions. The projects represented in this discussion are doing very different things with their mobile phones. The projects are also intervening in different types of local organisations and social structures. A better analysis might be conducted by looking at the impact of different 'services', or 'service interventions'. Evaluation needs to be asking questions like: What is the value of investing in mobile phone based advice services to individual farmers? What is the value of investing in mobile-based advice services within farmers co-ops? What is the value of investing in mobile-based news networking between NGOs / CBOs? What is the value of investing in mobile-based weather information services? ... Of course, there may be some macroeconomic evaluations that show how government investments in infrastructure are related to development outcomes, but these will just be broad correlations.

An important consideration in evaluating interventions is to consider the way that data is collected an interpreted. We are not just asking 'are mobiles beneficial?' - or at least I don't think that should be our question.Each project has a different model of what the mobiles are doing, who is operating the mobile, how people & organisations are working together, who is providing information and responses, how services are paid for, etc. At one level, we need independent evaluations of individual projects to inform funding decisions so that the "best" projects can be supported, extended & developed. But that work needs to be conducted by researchers who are able to understand the subtle technical, social & organisational differences between projects and between contexts. One thing we may want to do is to exert influence on network service providers to provide preferential rates (cf. the GrameenPhone model). At another level, there is the broader policy argument about getting funding for this kind of work. In this case, we may be competing with other types of agricultural intervention (e.g. price support, government agri extension programmes, input subsidies), or interventions in other areas (e.g. building schools or training health workers). I really don't know what we can do in that wider competition.

Hi Laura I'm very interested by your model of working with existing businesses & community associations. In the Rural e-Services project http://linux.odi.org.uk/eservblog we have been working with a farmers co-operative in Madhya Pradesh, India. The experience has convinced me that working with established community organisations may be a way to make the benefits of mobile technology more affordable for individual farmers. Andy