Q1. What government policies and programmes provide support for businesses in digital agriculture in a particular country? Please include references where possible.

Currently the Malawi government established the department of E-government which oversees National ICT Master Plan for Malawi. The National  ICT Master Plan was developed to operationalise the approved National ICT Policy in order to realise the vision
to make Malawi a knowledge based economy by year 2031. The plan spans the years
2014 to 2031, an eighteen year duration which is split into four (4) separate
plans.

Malawi goverment has put in place several ICT laws in place such as Communication act of 2016 https://www.macra.org.mw/?wpdmpro=communications-act-2016  and Electronic Transactions and Cyber Security Act, 2016 https://malawilii.org/mw/legislation/act/2016/33 .

This has enabled an enviroment for several players to develop digital agriculture programmes. For example SANE which is strengthening the capacity of the Government of Malawi's Department of Agricultural Extension Services (DAES) to mobilize and work with service providers to deliver agricultural and nutrition extension and advisory services more effectively and in a coordinated manner in the Feed the Future Zone of Influence. SANE is promoting access to video extension: http://paepard.blogspot.com/2018/10/exploring-access-to-videos-for.html

Another organisation is Farm Radio Trust (FRT) which promotes the use of radio and ICT to improve agricultural extension services: https://www.fdfa.eu/en/grant-for-farm-radio-trust-malawi-2020

Production of Agriculture information and sharing it using appropriate technologies such as videos has the most pervasive influence on attitudes and opinions in contemporary life especially in this century. In 2015 the Video production team of National Smallholders Farmers Association of Malawi (NASFAM) went to film a smallholder farmer Eletina Cosmas working with her pigeon peas and maize. They hoped that by the end of the day they will have a farmer-training video to pass on to other farmers. Eletina lives in one of the most remote rural areas of Malawi in Kasungu district, where water is a borehole away and electricity is something never heard of. On a 2.5-acre farm, she grows pigeon peas, soya and maize. These food crops sustain Eletina and her children throughout the year. Right before the camera rolled Eletina seems to be confused and she asks “How do I get to watch this video after you are finished doing it?” Eletina like most of smallholder in Malawi farmers are constantly on look for right quality information, at right time and right medium. In Mulanje district 600 Kilometres away from Eletina, there is a farmer called Mr Matola who has harvested nine bags of rice and before that he used to harvest only three bags. Before planting rice, he watched rice videos five times on the phone with about seven people, including men, women and children. The Videos were produced in Bangladesh by the partners of Access Agriculture. http://www.agtube.org/en/content/rice-videos-phones

How information flows in Malawi?

As the volume of digital information expands, the need for its logical organization is critical for purposes of information retrieval, sharing and reuse. In a 2014 study we learned that the DJs in Malawi distribute movies and music videos to a large rural audience. The DJs are mostly young men who are based in small towns and put videos on people’s cell phones and on DVDs (Bentley et al. 2014, 2016) (http://www.agroinsight.com/blog/?p=581) . Following that scoping study, in 2015 Ronald Udedi distributed three DVDs in English, Chichewa and other Malawian languages to 95 DJs in southern Malawi.

The DVD compilations were:

• Rice Advice (11 video modules)

• Fighting Striga (10 video modules)

• Chilli (7 video modules)

These were DVDs compiled from videos that Access Agriculture curates on www.accessagriculture.org. Each DVD has a language menu, where viewers can select a language (e.g. English or Chichewa) and then select which videos they want to watch. In September 2016, Jeff Bentley and Udedi visited as many DJs as possible, of those who had received the DVDs, to learn about their experience. This was also the first study where we sought out farmers who had watched the videos distributed by the DJs. It was learnt that 21,800 rural people watched some Access Agriculture videos as a result of Udedi’s efforts to distribute DVDs to 95 DJs in 2015.

How do DJs distribute videos to farmers?

DJs are young men who run shops called “burning centres”. These DJs rip off DVDs of Malawian music videos, Agriculture videos, movies from Hollywood, Bollywood and even Nollywood and format them into 3gp. 3gp is a video format for phones. During market days the farmers visit burning centres. The farmers can get his or her memory card filled up with Access Agriculture films to watch on the phone. These phones are not smart phones but the basic GSM phones with memory card slot (http://www.agroinsight.com/blog/?p=592) . This is exactly how Mr Matola got hold of rice videos.

ICT and farmers

Extension through government and farmer organisations is good, but do not reach all farmers, and all extension officers require quality support tools to get the message across in a way that speaks to farmers Farmers watching videos on their cell phones seem to be an ideal solution to the challenges such as lack of TV screens, DVD players and electricity. Though farmers like Eletina can be off internet grid but through intermediaries like the DJs they are able to access to quality videos at a small cost. But to enable rural learning without a personal facilitator, the videos need to be in the local language. For further reading check out: http://ictupdate.cta.int/2016/10/01/shave-haircut-and-a-video/

About Access Agriculture

Access Agriculture is an international NGO based in Nairobi, Kenya. It showcases farmer to farmer training videos available for use as agricultural extension tools in cross cultural languages at www.accessagriculture.org. Audio files are available for use by radio stations. Dissemination is done by partners and organisations who realise the benefit of the videos to their members. Access Agriculture has strengthened partners’ capacities in producing farmer to farmer video training. Videos and promoting them across Africa further work may be done on improving the translation of videos into multiple languages.