Kiringai, I appreciate your thoughtful response, but I am struggling to determine what your key message is regarding the question of "What are appropriate targets/data to monitor our progress in “e-agriculture”?"

When it comes to monitoring and evaluating the impact of our work in e-Ag, I think it is critical to be very clear about the indicators, and to ensure that we are looking at outcome indicators as well as proving causality. Many initiatives that I have seen focus on output indicators (e.g. number of people registered) rather than outcome indicators such as increases in productivty and income. I fully recognize that establishing causality is very difficult in this case, but that tends to be an issue of resources more than anything. If we could conduct RCTs on most e-Ag initiatives, we would have a more solid fact base on which to establish causality. However, RCTs are costly. Donor partners who are increasingly (and rightly) demanding better impact data need to acknowlege the cost implications involved.

Just because it's hard and costly doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, but we need our partners to walk that path with us.

Thanks for the great discussion so far. I very much appreciate the insights of Stephen, Lee and others on the issue of designing ICT interventions that take into account the particular challenges that women in developing countries face. Ideas like using women's voices for IVR messages are very relevant and actionable. 

I would like to suggest, though, that in the same way that not all poor people are the same, women also cannot be thought of as a single, uniform group when we are talking about designing ICT interventions. The mistake that many people make when it comes to product design, not just in our field, is to assume a far greater degree of homogeneity of preferences, behavior, etc. than actually exists. As we can intuit, not only can we not assume homogeneous preferences among all women, but we cannot really generalize about women in India alone, for example, or even rural women in India. The tendency to generalize often leads to poor design and ultimately product failure.

For this reason, Grameen Foundation has invested tremendously in developing a human-centered design (HCD) approach to product and service design. Rather than using deductive or inductive reasoning, this approach relies heavily on observation and repeated iterations of hypotheses based on those observations. In this way, we don't fall into the trap of desiging for the lowest common denominator, which is usually a race to the bottom. 

Observing women's behavior, and not just listening to what the women tell us, will ultimately guide us to more effective ICT solutions for them.