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Over the past few weeks, I have been testing mobile-to-web applications for use in our agriculture knowledge system and disease surveillance pilot in Tanzania, including FrontlineSMS, RapidSMS, and SMSFoxbox. During my research of these apps and other ICT tools, I discovered an excellent e-agriculture resource produced at the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) by Mucemi Gakuru, Kristen Winters, and Francois Stepman called Inventory of Innovative Farmer Advisory Services using ICTs (PDF Link).

According to the report, the inventory lays the groundwork for more extensive research of innovative farmer information systems that FARA is planning, which they indicate will include more detailed analysis of project successes. The inventory provides an overview of various services provided and contains around fifty projects in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Example projects include the First Mile Project and Esoko (formerly Tradenet) and projects are organized into four categories including:
* Voice information delivery services (4 projects) – represents telephone-based information delivery services, including call centers and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) functionality that provides advice on farming methods and market access.
* Radio dial up (agricultural information on demand) and regular radio broadcasts (5 projects) – regular radio broadcasts that provide market prices or other agricultural information and dial-up radio that feature a series of short segment audio programs that provide small-scale farmers telephone access to relevant information through an automated voice system; also allows farmers to ask questions through SMS, or broadcasting information gathered through question and answer vouchers or other innovative means.
* Extension services based on mobile phone and database monitoring (16 projects) – a media channel that allows anyone anywhere to affordably share market information via mobiles or through the internet.
* E-learning for basic skills, agricultural education and video-based approaches (35 projects) – the provision of information and learning material for agricultural skills, including those with video.

Supply-side Infonomics¹
Besides the extensive inventory, I was very pleased with the methodology used by the team; in particular, the focus on social and economic impact of the ICT projects, and the assessment of information demand and associated transaction costs incurred by farmers during each stage of the agricultural value chain. As Sarah Cheeseman questioned in an earlier post, how do we measure the socio-economic impact of agriculture health interventions on the human population? I am very curious how FARA intends to analyze this issue; and I offer our assistance. According to FARA, a farmer relies heavily on the extension worker for information and has information needs related to six major stages: Deciding, Seeding, Preparing and Planting, Growing, Harvesting (packing and storing), and Selling. Among these stages, research shows the highest percentage of “information cost” is incurred during the growth stage, followed by the decision stage and selling stage.²

Similarly, when we were in Tanzania and Kenya, our first goal was to develop a greater understanding for the livestock marketing chain. Obviously, our intent was similar to FARA’s, which was to understand the demand for information at each point of exchange by disaggregating the value chain to a series of activities.

I’ll assume it’s obvious how the marketing chain plays a role in agricultural knowledge sharing and disease surveillance. However, I think it’s worthwhile to point out the FARA research: A marketing chain can be seen as a multi-stakeholder network that is highly integrated and shares a common perspective or goal: to deliver a product as cheaply and efficiently as possible to the consumer. Increasing the efficiency of the whole chain – the purpose of providing agricultural information – is in the interest of all stakeholders, whether they are farmers, processors, transporters, retailers or others. Threat of competition leads chain partners to be highly aware of the ‘competitive position’ of their chain vis-à-vis others. This awareness leads to ‘chain thinking’.

Of course, from a technology standpoint, we need to interpret the perspective of each stakeholder as it translates to system functionality, user adoption, and incentive. If the goal is to lower the informational transaction costs of the stakeholder (farmer), we must consider technologies that are proving increasingly successful at doing just that, like many Web 2.0 platforms. Additionally, appropriate information and training should help increase agriculture quality, increases product marketability, and timely delivery of goods.

ICT Obstacles and The Next Frontier
There’s no doubt in my mind that the need for innovative information systems in agriculture is significant and the obstacles numerous. FARA identified issues in providing these services that one might expect including: illiteracy, poor Internet infrastructure, information overload, and SMS character limitations. Additionally, they identified speech synthesis issues with voice-based solutions, interoperability, dependency on mobile telephony providers, and sustainability issues.

Ultimately, FARA recommends a comprehensive model…to address the limitations of existing methods, by offering a holistic, one-stop-shop information service on a variety of carefully integrated platforms, complete with a farmers’ feedback loop. FARA identified three stages of need:

1. The basic information needs for farmers are market information prices, weather forecasts, transport facilities and information on storage facilities
2. The second level of information need is for crop and cattle diseases, fertilizers, etc.
3. The third level is more context- and local-specific and requires the direct interface between the extension worker and the farmer.

The effort serves as an excellent resource for those of us interested in surveying the agricultural ICT landscape in Africa, and I look forward to the more in depth research FARA intends to take on this topic. Moving forward, I would like to see more collective efforts built around ICT specific in its application to capacity building through agriculture. Similar to the recently launched Open Mobile Consortium, I see tremendous benefit in sharing best practices, source code, standards, ideas and lessons learned. The folks at FARA have several platforms, including the Regional Agricultural Information and Learning System (RAILS), which is an active platform for people working in agricultural information and communication systems. According to FARA, it’s a platform they’d like to see become a central resource to help ensure interoperability, expand data sharing, simplify development and deployment, and help guarantee the use of shared technologies within the agricultural sector. I appreciate FARA’s work in this area, and look forward to engaging those in agricultural ICT; especially if it involves an open dialogue with all stakeholders, most importantly the farmers.

¹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infonomics

²de Silva, H and D. Ratnadiwakara. “Using ICT to Reduce Transaction Costs in Agriculture through Better Communication: A case study from Sri Lanka.” LIRNEasia, Colombo, Sri Lanka. Research carried out with the aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada, 2008, http://www.lirneasia.net.