My second contribution looks at bridging the information gap among horticulture farmers across the globe, rigional blocks such as SADC and provinces within a country, kind of agricultural extension services without borders. ICT should be used for information interchange and twinning global regions with similar climate however one of them beng less productive. To feed the ever growing world population there should be a lot of coorperation among horticulturists and ICTs should be used to unite efforts by various supporting NGOs programs so that there is cross pollination of ideas and resource sharing to avoid duplication of effort.

My view especially on Zimbabwe is the need to first have a comprehensive robust modularized agricultural information database system as we currently don't have such a system as most of our knowledge is either hard copies or isolated electronic databases. Worse is our traditional knowledge which is dying with our fore parents. These modules will have horticulture module, cotton module, animal farming module etc and then agricultural Value added services which covers financing, marketing, commodity prices, weather etc. modules will cover full cycle calendar of activities expected in the type of farming addressed and VAS services are things that can be common to all farmers. The challenge is that most systems available are not trusted as they belong to individual entrepreneurs either seeking agri -insurance business or a platform to provide marketing services of crops that were probably financed by some shadowy money lenders who in most cases would not want the farmers to know the true value of their produce and therefore more inclined to sabotage other systems by talking nagatively about them. We still have one way non interactive communication and the bulk of it is mainly annoying full of marketing jargon in SMS or email. One thing l know is that farmers will invest if they see value in it. Farmers can invest in tablets and solar powered chargers if they know it can enhance their output quality, quantity and income. Developing countries depend mainly on organic fertilizers and instead of using that as an excuse there is an opportunity to e-track and e-tag organically produced horticulture products which can be sold at high prices in the developed world. Most horticulture produce is perishable and hence ICT will help the farmers to communicate just in time for picking to avoid loss. In terms of crop diseases farmers can take pictures and upload on to the crop diseases module in a similar fashion as we do on social media and they are responded to immediately by manning humans or robots for possible remedies. The module can be connected to an international database with interconnected experts - then we have connected horticulture systems. We have expertise dotted around globe and we need that connected farming intelligence. For instance we can have a pool of expertise on sub-Saharan agriculture for crops, diseases, marketing etc then we can have sustainable poverty alleviating response and avoid peace meal approach.