“Creating social change through media is not about the tools you use, the technologies, the perceived quality of the media produced. It’s about a real and deep understanding of needs: knowing what will work for your community.”  Professor Clemencia Rodiguez.

The first part, for me, is knowing the families you will be working with – their education level, their cultural obligations and customs, their income and the consistency of it, their skills and experience, their aspirations and the parts of their family – in Samoa it is common to have three generations on the same land. You have to know the infrastructure – electricity and telecommunications – so you can provide tech tools that can be supported easily. You also have to know the root problem of what you are trying to solve.

With specific reference to Women in Business Development Inc family farmers, we had a number of problems that we thought ICTs could solve. We were wasting time and fuel going to visit farmers who weren’t there, and locating a farm when you hadn’t been there before was difficult with no Google maps and no street signs. We also had no access to farmer files once we left the office. We were also blind to what the farmers were doing. We could not see when crops were being planted or harvested. We had just started a Farm to Table supply programme to hotels and restaurants and we needed to be in contact with farmers and our own field workers more.

The first thing we did is equip our staff with mobile phones and calling credit. The funding for this was via PACMAS (Australian Aid). The next thing we did was start designing a suite of mobile apps – the first one as a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) that could be updated from the field. Our initial tests looked fine but as we travelled to more remote areas, we saw that we needed the app to be offline and then synced when connected to the internet for it to work in Samoa. We are still at phase one and have yet to build the apps for the farmers and also the hotels but we are learning lessons along the way. The first is to keep it simple and focussed on the problem you are trying to solve. Otherwise, you end up with a flash product that has many features but still does not address the main problem. The other lesson is that although you may have to work with technical people, you need to keep in the driver’s seat. You know your family farmers and understand the cultural, economic and social landscape they are operating in – this is key to a successful ICT programme.