#ict4ag

Strategic benefits of and approaches to agricultural mobile finance

Lee H. Babcock, ACDI/VOCA ICT4Ag International Conference 2013, Session: ICTs/Mobile apps for Access to Financial Services and Insurance http://www.ict4ag.org

Here we are!

Agritools platform online!

Go to the website, read the tutorial, learn how to watch our contents and read the stories from Africa.

We will constantly upload new research material that we collected in our three month travels in Senegal, Kenya, Uganda and Ghana, with a crowdsourcing space for African organizations and enterprises in collaboration with e-agriculture.

Experts, hubs, startups, Ngos and farmers: we tried to get as many testomonies as possible, in order to analyse what this digital revolution impact in the primary sector in Africa and how the institutions and development actors should concentrate for the future actions.

The Agritools platform is free and available for everyone, with the special aim to reach the youth and help them understand the real value of working in agriculture in an innovative and fruitful way.

A long road brought us to Cheptais, a village located in the extreme West of Kenya, close to the border with Uganda, with a condition of isolation that is permeating every aspect of the daily life for the farmers who are living here. When we jump out from the car, many kids began to look at us and to shout, thinking that Sandro (the Agritools videomaker) - who wares long hairs and some weird - was Jesus...funny moments! Probably for them it was the first meeting with a mzungu [white man, in swahili].

Gerry Boiyo is the Project Officer ICT at the Anglican Development Service,a local Ngo that is working in this community, filling a gap uncovered by the national and the regional institutions in the field of agriculture. Some of the activities promoted by ADS in last years are focusing on the use of ICTs. Video to share information, SMS to access the market prices through the mFarm platform, FrontlineSMS to collect information and ICT trainings for women. The introduction of these tools represented a revolution for the farmers of the Cheptais community and we went into the field to meet them and collect their testimony.

Once again, the relationship between genders and ICTs represents a point of reflection in the ICT4Ag sector and Cheptais had lot of things to say about it. Concerning the influence on women empowerment, ICTs are strong agents that can change the traditional equilibrium in a family, due to the fact that an empowered women is not well accepted in a traditional family contest. But thanks to the ADS trainings, step by step these ladies got the opportunity to reflect about their rights and they are now able to improve their production and incomes, being indipendent from their husbands.

So “what to do” and “how to do it” are the questions that are leading the ADS action in this Western Province village of Kenya. People from the region is finding in ICTs a kind of mirror which allows them to reflect their presence to the outside world and we know that this process, once started, it becomes unstoppable. It could be interesting to come back to Cheptais in few years and see how all these potatoes and onions grew up, thanks to the women work in agriculture.

Some weeks ago we visited Nandi Hills, in the Western Kenya. A shocking green was waiting for us over there: the tea plantations are dominating the whole landscapes and for many kilometers you'll be surrounded by a geometrical carpet of differen green shades.

The reason of our presence there is related to WeFarm, a "pioneering social enterprise" which aims to enable peer to peer knowledge sharing about agriculture between different producers around the world.

WeFarm was about to launch their SMS platform in different localities of the Nandi Hills region when we reached there with our car, were twenty farmers were waiting for the training in the shadow of a zibibo tree.

We had the opportunity to speak with Camille, the local coordinator of the project. At the same time, we were sharing feelings with the six young graduated students that were coordinating the meeting between WeFarm and the farmers. We made several interviews to women who do family farming and tea plantations and we were able to start some interesting discussions with them about the expected results of ICTs in agriculture for the local problems affecting the sector, especially for women.

WeFarm is a SMS system that allow farmers to ask and answer questions about agriculture; the cost for a message is the price of a local message and they can ask info about any issue or information concerning agriculture.

More details will be available soon in our Agritools platform!

Our main trip in Kenya is directed to the Western part of the country. Dusty roads and different kinds of green vegetations were the "leit-motiv" outside the window of Bundi's car (our anthropologist friend/assistant). As the majority of African economies, Kenya is mainly fed by its agriculture. The diversity in terms of climatic zones, water availability and altitudes makes of Kenya a huge garden.

The first stop is Kakamega. The county is characterized by a strong agricultural soul and mostly women are working on it - while men and young go to the cities, looking for different kind of jobs. For these farmers, a constant support is provided by Kakamega Rural Development Programme (KARDEP), a local organization based in Kakamega town which is trying to generate a network of smallholder farmers into the region. KARDEP is supported by Biovision, a not-for-profit Trust established under the Kenyan law in 2009 by the Biovision Foundation for ecological development of Switzerland and the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE).

KARDEP is leading, in partnership with Safaricom, a system which allows farmers to save money through their mobile phone by using the most popular e-banking kenyan service, M-pesa.

This tool is particularly useful because it gives the possibility to save daily small amounts of their incomes. Step by step these farmers are able to save more and even get a loan without using a bank. Most of the users of this tool are women who improve their poultry through this project.

The main ethnic group of this region are the Luhya and their main activity is poultry: the women are the economy drivers of the family farming over here.

It seems that "Kenya is the place to be", especially if you're looking for some connection and people interested in innovative ways to think the agricultural sector.

Two days ago we gave the first presentation of Agritools project at the Italian Cultural Institute of Nairobi. Our team was invited there, to show the initiative in a public presentation. We found out a strong interest on the topic of ICTs in the primary sector, and we got in touch with others organizations and students working on it.

We had the first occasion to get feedbacks and point of views from the public, who encouraged us to work strongly and to deepener certain problematic and issues we are facing on the field, relating different levels of the rural development.

Kenya meant also the beginning of a collaboration with Kenneth Bundi, a graduated anthropologist from the University of Nairobi and lecturer. We travelled with him to the fields and his contribution was prominent in terms of research methodologies and approaches.

Agritools wants to be, and it is actually becoming, something more a journalist research: our wish is moving toward a deep investigation over this topic.

We finally left Nairobi yesterday morning, direction Uganda. In our luggage, we got already 246 GB of video materials, hundreds of photos, some wonderful dress and food that you won't find anywhere else in the world.

In November 2014 our team spent two days in Wageningen, a small town in Netherlands where is based the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA), an international institution of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group of States and the European Union (EU) that is engaged in the food and nutritional security, increasing prosperity and encouraging sound natural resource management.

Why did we choose to visit CTA?

CTA is one of the pioneer in the ICT for agriculture sector and is particularly involved in promoting activities in the ACP countries as web 2.0 trainings, Hackatons for agriculture, research support and technical assistance.

We tried to collect the expert point of views on the challenges and opportunities that the ICT use can bring to the primary sector, speaking about how the web innovations are helping the rural development with some case studies and exaples of CTA initiatives.

Let's meet the experts!

Ken Lohento, ICT4D Programme Coordinator at CTA, told us about the youth involvement in ICT and agriculture and what the organisation is doing to boost the sector. Some initiative samples where he is involved are the ARDYIS Project, the AgriHack Talent Programme  and the YoBloCo Awards, a youth in agriculture blog competition.                                                            

Giacomo Rambaldi, Senior Programme Coordinator at CTA, explained us how the organisation coordinate the Web 2.0 trainings in ACP countries and the participatory GIS activities he leads in some indigenous community.

Benjamin Addom, Programme Coordinator, is one of the organisers of the ict4ag conference (held in Kigali in 2013) and the fin4ag conference (held in Nairobi in 2014) and told us how this kind of initiatives are influencing the civil society and government involvement in the ICT4AG sector.                                                                                                         The videos will be soon available in the Agritools platform, stay tuned! 

Useful material:                                                                                          

- The Web2forDev story: towards a community of practice

Agritools is a research exploratory project that aims to understand the real effects of the use of ICTs (Innovation and Communication Technologies) in the field of agriculture, fisheries and livestock in Africa. We are travelling in Europe and Africa and we will launch soon a web series where we will try to discover some innovative ICT African projects in the field of agriculture. Our main goal is to investigate the impact resulting from this digital revolution on the lives of locals and on their relationship with the land, food and traditions.