Of course infrastructure is often a big problem for rural areas, and making technology adoption work. But I see a more fundamental problem to ICT implementation with farmers, which is the lack-of descoping technical possibilities to the level of the easiest functional value. 

Technological potential is tricky. It makes innovator-engineers believe that anything is possible. This is very useful for the aspirational side of ICT development. You first have to believe it's possbile, before you start making it possible.

But seeing the potential, also comes with a common frustration that farmers aren't ready yet to make use of it. There's computer literacy involved, there's customs around farm management practice, and there's trust issues around outside advice about how to run the farm. Such factors all work against implementation of the seemingly technologically advance alternative.

Regardless of the ICT project you're working on, I would advice to descope your solution to such a level that you start by meeting farmers where they currently are, not where you want them to be. This might lead to less appealing project proposals like IoT for farming, and such, but it does bring focus on the most immendiate functional value that you can bring to farmers.

Once you get a foothold with one small part of the solution, then your roadmap will start to gradually unfold for the rest of the solution becomes more concrete. It's easier to prioirties the release of the next feature, and holding the rest for later in the backlog. It also brings focus to partnerships that need to be created for compensating for lack of infrastructure, and other facets of distribution. (eg. mobile payment service, rural electrification initiatives, cooperatives, etc)

So, my advice would be to address the developers understanding of process, and mindset first. Keep development farmer-centric, and work your way up the technology ladder together with them.

[Full disclosure: I'm part of a community of FarmHack.nl. An movement dedicated to farmer-centric technoogy innovation. FarmHack is building the business case for open innovation technology development for the whoel agricultural value chain, in a farmer-centric way]

Hello All,

I'm happy with these interesting discussions. The volume of response and enthousiasm alone are indication enough of the potential of ICT in agricultural development!

This rightly-founded optimism aside, I think there is also cause for a critical perspective on how projects in this space are set up. One of the points for my greater concern is wrapped in the way that the question to this discussion string is formulated. The question, in my perspective, overemphasizes the importance of the solution, rather than the way the opportunity for the solution was defined.

Why is this relevant? Technology is always an amplification of existing behavior. If we understand the behavioral rationale of the intended end-users of a product or service, then we are better able to design specific solutions that connect with the jobs they're trying to get done.

However, by omitting opportunity definition from the presentation of the solution case, we lose the insights that were used to create the service in the first place. We won't be able to improve and learn about our approaches, let alone create conditions for replication and scale.

So instead of the question above, I would give the discussion a different angle. Perhaps something along the following line: 

What are relevant insights about family farmers that can inform the design of ICT and communication services that target them?

As an example I would suggest to read this blog entry from the people at ESOKO, an SMS-based communication services for farmers

The writer mentions how ESOKO stumbled on use cases after developing and implementing their solution. That is not the way I would recommend doing it. Some exploratory user research would have helped define these surprises upfront. But the point is that farmers, luckily, found their own way in use of the platform to do the existing jobs of meetings, and getting feedback on using a new pesticides more effectively and efficiently. 

Sorry to be a bit of a curmudgeon here, but I think the above is often missing in our conversations, and that it hampers our progress. I hope to hear about your perspective on this.

Best wishes

Bart

@bartdoorneweert