ICTs and mobile money can have multi-disciplinary impact given the nature of their technology(ies).  As such, to leverage the power of these technologies requires the formation of agriculture ICT/mobile money strategic alliances with multiple stakeholders.  A national e-agriculture strategy will provide the frameworks, parameters, guidelines and best practices for inviting potential partners, negotiating each partners roles/responsibilities and subsequently forming committed e-agriculture partnerships.       In the case of agriculture mobile money there are a number of dynamics that can strategically align a large commodity buyer with a mobile financial services provider and other supporting entities.  The commodity buyer wants to replace its obsolete cash payment scheme with an efficient, low-cost digital payment mechanism, the mobile financial services provider wants more transaction fees and farmers benefit from convenient and safe receipt and storage of crop payments and option to use mobile money for more input supplies, health, education, solar power/lanterns, credit, savings, insurance and much more.     An e-agriculture strategy that accommodates mobile money and other ICT strategic alliances will create the enabling environment at the policy level that will match - and accelerate - the groundswell of interest in using these technologies to benefit agriculture!  

This is a tremendously exciting space and those of us in this e-forum and in this ICT4AG/m-Ag/e-Ag community are at the forefront of something big.  We should remember, though, that this space is a very recent phenomena.  As CTA and CGAP and others continue thinking about the future it seems we might be moving into the next generation (2.0) of this space.  It seems that what might be emerging as part of 2.0 is a redefinition of the unit from the farmer to the smallholder farming family.  This has resonance with John Tull's point about business modeling and Stephen Boyera's point about bottom up, locally relevant content.  So far we as a community (by virtue of our interest in ag) have focused on agriculture.  From a user centric design perspective our farmers have households with multiple streams of income (e.g. agriculture, remittances, off-farm labor, handicrafts, etc.) and need for multiple streams of household expenditures (e.g. ag inputs, health, education, utilities, food, etc.).  Meanwhile, the power of the technology is that platforms can easily be designed with multiple functionalities to accomodate the full range of mobile payments and bottom up, locally relevant content needs of smallholder farming families.  If we match the commercial sector's need for volume with the farming family's need for a more powerful value proposition, in need of more youth like Nana Darko, we might see more scale in this space.  

If we accept this premise that we should redefine the unit from the farmer to the smallholder farming family, then it seems a critical challenge for us is to match the power of our brains to the power of the technology and broaden our thinking about how to empower the farmer's family?  If so, then what acronymn would we use to replace the awkward ICT4AG/m-Ag/e-Ag?