Late blight (Phytophthora infestans) is the most common and highly destructive, fungal disease in potato, tomato and other solanaceae crops in Bangladesh. Annual potato yield losses due to late blight have been estimated at 25-57%.

Late blight can be controlled but only by frequent and costly applications of fungicides. Moreover, the degree of control heavily depends on the timing of the fungicide application in relation to local weather conditions, crop development and disease pressure. So, the efficiency of late blight control can be improved considerably by informing farmers in time about predicted infection periods of the potato crop and the effectiveness of past spray applications.

GEOPOTATO will develop and implement a decision support service (DSS) in Bangladesh for an optimal control strategy of late blight in potato. The DSS will provide farmers with preventive spray advice when a late blight infection period is predicted to occur. The DSS also evaluates past sprays, which may result in curative spray advice when, despite past sprays, infection is likely to have occurred in the past few days.

Information based upon satellite data and using various models are important aspects of the DSS, which continuously measures and forecasts weather and biomass growth of potato crops in relation to the late blight disease cycle. The DSS evaluates this information to provide farmers with a timely spray advice.

Target user group

GEOPOTATO aims at becoming the preferred agricultural advice service for over 750,000 small farmers in Bangladesh that grow potatoes on 450,000 ha in the dry winter season.

Business proposition

The late blight alert service will be provided on a subscription base to farmers, through SMS or voicemail during the potato growing season. Expected farmer benefits range between 100 and 250 Euro per hectare - depending on the farmers’ current agricultural management and disease control.

Partnership

The GEOPOTATO consortium consists of seven public and private organisations, each with their own expertise:

• Agriculture Information Service (Bangladesh): Farmer groups and ICT solutions for farmers
• Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies (Bangladesh):Remote sensing and GIS
• ICCO-Cooperation (Bangladesh): Farm business groups and development
• mPower (Bangladesh): Data integration and mobile communication
• TerraSphere (Netherlands): Remote sensing and GIS
• Wageningen University (Netherlands): weather forecasting, late blight risk model and crop growth mode

Lead contact : Wageningen University and research , Huib Hengsdijk and  JOOst van Uum

mPower Social Enterprises Limited is an ICT4D organization based in Bangladesh which works with ICT solutions for end level beneficiaries based on the approach of Human Centrered Design (HCD). e-Agriculture Unit is one of the biggest domain of mPower which implement different projects with public and private partners. Currently e-Agriculture unit is implementing three large scale projects and multiple small scale projects to reach six hundred thousands farmers and extension agents through technology. These projects has taken different crops into their contribution where horticulture and tuber crops has a majority portion as contents. Smartphone applications, web applications, satellite and remote sensing data driven precision agriculture, IVR/SMS/Voice Dial are some of the key tools developed by mPower for different projects. Today I am going to talk on a specific large scale project which is implementing 'Digital Extension' solutions in Bangladesh.  

Case Study Project: USAID funded Agriculture Extension Project in Bangladesh

This project is implemented by three organizations namely Dhaka Ahsania Mission, CARE Bangladesh and mPower. mPower designed, developed and deployed the ICT solutions here. The objective is to implement capacity building and support creation of a farmer’s demand-driven agricultural extension system, synergized by the use of information communication technology (ICT). After starting the 5 years long project in 2012, the team started to work on solving three specific challenges in Bangladesh extension through digital intervention.

1. First is the absence or limited presence of expert consultation in rural parts of the country. A total of 16,500 public extension agents named Sub-Assistant Agriculture Officer or SAAO are employed all over the country to provide extension services to around 15 million farming households.
2. Another challenge is to keep the knowledge base of extension agents up-to-date. With the improving technology and continuous research, nowadays agricultural knowledge gets updated quite often. But there is no specific mechanism in place to regularly train extension agents after a certain interval in a proper learning environment.
3. Thirdly, there is limited availability of tools for decision-makers to collect real time information from the field while taking decisions or making policies.  

To address these above mentioned challenges in the agricultural sector, project has taken an integrated ICT approach which involves mobile, web apps and multimedia contents for mobile phones. There were plenty of different interventions (Total 8) but I am going to talk on some Key Interventions.

Agriculture Knowledge Bank (AKB)

Agriculture Knowledge Bank (AKB) is an interactive web knowledge portal managed by Agriculture Information Service (AIS) of Government of Bangladesh, containing information on agricultural content and recommendations of multiple crops. it will be live for public very soon.  Its a Web based portal where there are some features such as 

• ICT based web platform for centralizing agro knowledge in one portal; Now there are more than 30 crops including HORTICULTURE. Another 20 crops content will be included within some time. 
• Access to this platform can provide interactive agricultural extension message;
• Intelligent search function and filtering option require less effort to access information;
• Easily updatable through admin module by non-ICT Expert;
• Field level farmers and extension agents can access content through mobile;

Logic behind developing AKB

A lot of information on agricultural content is available on websites of various government and agricultural research organizations of Bangladesh. Attaining these scattered information seems quite difficult for general people let alone farmers. Most importantly farmers and other relevant stakeholders are not even aware about the available agricultural information and ways of accessing them. To reduce this information gap, Agriculture Knowledge Bank was developed with the support of AIS under Ag. Extension project to ensure farmers and relevant agricultural stakeholders can access crop related information in one single web platform.

Sustainibility

It will be managed by the Govt.'s Agriculture Information Service Department (AIS) as public portal, so it is accessible by anyone.

Farmer Query System (FQS) - Remote Agro Advosory Service

Farmer query system is a smartphone application based technology solution that allows quality and timely provision of remote agro consultations and solutions for farmers in Bangladesh. It is a mobile app used by infomediary who collect queries and send the collected data to the agriculture experts who then reviews all the information on a web dashboard and send the recommendations and solutions to the local intermediary through SMS, Voice Message or Phone call which is then passed on to the farmers. Thois application is being used by more than 4000 users as infomediaries which serves more than one hundred thousands farmers in Bangladesh. So far 55000 queries have been solved through this application. The users are farmers, extension officers (Both public and private), input sellers and tele centre agents.

Benefits of FQS

• Deliver quality agro recommendations to farmers’ on-demand by linking them to remote agro consultation services;
• Ensuring agriculture experts provide proper recommendations since FQS Smartphone application captures farmers’ need systematically;
• Ensure timely and effective digital extension service where there is scarcity of extension agents in the field;
• Real-time data of farmers’ need, provide avenue of decision making to policymakers, researchers and extension workers. 

Logic behind developing FQS

It is quite impossible for the small number of public extension agents to serve this large number of farmers. As the country’s mobile network penetration is almost 99% and smart phone penetration is also on the increase, mPower Social Enterprises Ltd. came up with the idea of providing agro consultation to the farmers in remote areas by taking advantage of this advanced technology. Basically FQS application was developed to reduce the existing gap between limited public extension workers and large number of farm households in providing agro consultation.

Sustainibility

• As a public partner of the project - Govt's Agriculture Information Service (AIS) will host the service.
• mPower will try a business model where farmers will be able to get agricultural solution by paying a certain amount of monthly subscription. Another model is to charge input selling companies so that they can have that as an added extension service to sell their products.  

Public Extension Agents (SAAO) Digital Diary Application

SAAO Digital Diary is a smartphone application which is developed to help Sub-Assistant Agriculture Officers (SAAO) to log in their daily visits or services provided to the farmers digitally. Through SAAO Diary application, Sub-Assistant Agriculture Officers can put their daily activity information which can be viewed by their supervisors for monitoring purpose. To ensure accountability and transparency, a web dashboard was developed to be used at supervisors (Sub District Agriculture Officer/UAO) end through which UAOs will be able to monitor daily activities of the SAAOs working under their supervision. This whole process was initiated to reduce the lengthy administrative process that takes place between UAO and SAAO usually over paper based documents. Total 130 SAAOs  got smartphones along with this application from the project and are serving thousands of farmers from their extension centres and field.

Logic behind developing SAAO Digital Diary

Before initiating ICT interventions in USAID funded Ag. Extension Project, mPower Social Enterprises Ltd. conducted a need assessment on project stakeholders (Farmers, extension agents) at the project locations. The findings derived from the assessment revealed that the daily paperwork for conducting field visits consume a significant amount of time of SAAOs. This activity reduces their time to provide agricultural extension service to the farmers. In order to save more time and to ensure smooth extension service delivery, SAAO digital diary is developed which takes very less time to record daily activities and saves them digitally to be monitored by their supervisors.

Sustainibility

At the end of Ag. Extension project, SAAO digital diary will be handed over to Department of Agricultural Extension’s (DAE) ICT department to maintain the service beyond project cycle because SAAOs are the direct employees of DAE who manages them at the field level to provide extension service to the farmers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjHqyM-EfkQ&t=109s