Tag: mobile technology

Press 4 for fertilizer: M-farming in Ethiopia

Ethiopian farmer Eshete Eneyew threshes maize in Abay, north of Addis Ababa. (Pic: Reuters)

One reason farmers in Africa mostly produce so much less than those in other parts of the world is that they have limited access to the technical knowledge and practical tips that can significantly increase yields. But as the continent becomes increasingly wired, this information deficit is narrowing.

While there are other factors, such as poor infrastructure and low access to credit and markets, that have helped keep average yields in Africa largely unchanged since the 1960s, detailed and speedily-delivered information is now increasingly recognised as an essential part of bringing agricultural production levels closer to their full potential.

In Ethiopia, which already has one of the most extensive systems in the world for educating the 85 percent of the population who work the land for a living, this recognition has driven the development of a multilingual mobile phone-based resource centre.

The hotline, operated by the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research, and Ethio Telecom, and created by the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA), has proved a huge hit. Since its July launch and still in its pilot phase, more than three million farmers in the regions of Amhara, Oromia, Tigray and the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region (SNNPR) have punched 8028 on their mobiles to access the system, which uses both interactive voice response (IVR) and SMS technology.

“On average we get approximately 226 new calls and 1 375 return calls per hour into the system,” Elias Nure, the information communication technology project leader at ATA, told IRIN. When the number of lines doubles from the current 90, he said, “these numbers should significantly increase.”

More than 70 percent of users are smallholder farmers, he said.

Timely, accurate
Ethiopia has the largest agricultural extension system in sub-Saharan Africa, the third largest in the world after China and India, according to the UN Development Programme.

This system has led to the establishment of about 10,000 Farmer Training Centres, and trained at least 63,000 field extension workers, also known as development agents. It facilitates information exchange between researchers, extension workers and farmers.
However, the reliance on development agents means that sometimes agronomic information reaches farmers too late or is distorted.

Push and pull factors
The agriculture hotline was proving popular due to its “pull” and “push” factors, according to ATA’s chief executive officer, Khalid Bomba.

Farmers could pull out practical advice, while customised content could be pushed out, such as during pest and disease outbreaks, to different callers based on the crop, or geographic or demographic data captured when farmers first registered with the system.

Recently, it warned registered farmers about the threat posed by wheat stem rust.

“These alerts and notifications were not available to smallholder farmers in the past and could greatly benefit users of the system by getting access to warnings in real-time,” said ATA’s Elias.

According to Tefera Derbew, Ethiopia’s minister of agriculture, ATA should boost its content to meet more needs.

“The IVR system offers users information relevant to the key cereals and high value crops, but I envisage that in the near future there will be the opportunity to upscale the service to include content relevant to all of the major agricultural commodities in the country, including livestock,” said Tefera.

The hotline currently focuses on cereal crops such as barley, maize, teff, sorghum and wheat, but plans are under way to provide agricultural advice on other crops, such as sesame, chickpea, haricot beans and cotton, while incorporating farmers’ feedback on needs.

For Ayele Worku, a teff farmer in Gurage zone of Ethiopia’s SNNPR State, the system’s benefits outweigh the frustrations of a patchy mobile network.

“The way of farming, especially for row-planting for teff is kind of new for me although I heard rumours about its advantage a while ago,” he told IRIN.

This break with tradition in the way teff is sown has seen yields increase by up to 75 percent.

An agricultural extension and rural development expert working at Addis Ababa University, Seyoum Ayalew, said: “The new service could build a synergy with the previous approaches of the public extension system, which is largely based on trickle down approach of communication.”

Seyoum noted that within the traditional extension system, “where information passes through different channels before reaching the farmers, [it] is subjected to distortion through filtering and translation errors.”

10 years ago

Zambia: Teens turn to text messages for Aids advice

A Zambian HIV counsellor looks at text messages coming up on the U-report platform for HIV and Aids awareness at a call centre in Lusaka. (Pic: AFP)

The questions teenagers ask about HIV are brutally honest, anonymous – and sent in 160 characters or less over mobile phone text messages.

At U-Report, a Zambian HIV advice organisation, thousands of bite-sized questions come through every day.

One asks, “I have a girl who has HIV and now she is talking about marriage what can I do with her?”

Another wants to know “when you kiss someone deeply can it be possible to contract the virus?”

Though Aids-related deaths are significantly decreasing internationally, they continue to rise among adolescents, according to a Unicef report released last week.

But services like U-Report are offering a new way to get through to teens too afraid or too embarrassed to talk to health care workers face-to-face.

Located in a nondescript office building in Lusaka, the counsellors sit behind desktop computers answering SMS queries on everything from how the virus is spread, to the pros and cons of male circumcision.

Launched in 2012, the service now boasts over 70 000 subscribers and is being used as a model for other countries, including South Africa and Tanzania.

“We are receiving messages from all over Zambia,” said manager Christina Mutale. “It went viral.”

Significantly, a third of participants are teens, those most likely to die from Aids.

Sitting in a garden outside the Lusaka clinic where she receives her treatment, U-Report user Chilufya Mwanangumbi said counsellors could be hard to find.

High infection rate
With purple-painted nails and dreams of being a civil engineer, the 19-year-old student is one of Zambia’s many teenagers living with HIV.

“At other clinics, they don’t tell you what to do, they just tell you you’re positive and send you home with the drugs,” said Mwanangumbi.

“That’s when people kill themselves – because they think it’s the end of the world.”

UNAIids, the UN agency battling the disease, estimates 2.1 million adolescents are living with HIV in 2013, 80 percent of them in sub-Saharan Africa.

Zambia has one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world – an estimated 13 percent of its 14 million people are infected.

Signs of the epidemic are everywhere.

In the Saturday Post newspaper nearly half of the classifieds section is filled with adverts for herbal cures for HIV and Aids, alongside remedies for wide hips and reclaiming lost lovers.

And while U-Report is starting to address the teenage HIV crisis, the barriers to success in the country are high. Even if teens get access to counselling, they may struggle to find a suitable clinic in Zambia, where there is a chronic shortage of doctors and health workers.

Medical services and technology
Yet there has never been a better time for a mobile phoned-based counselling service.

By the end of 2014, there will be more than 635 million mobile subscriptions in sub-Saharan Africa, a number set to grow as phones become cheaper and data more readily available, said Swedish technology company Ericsson in a recent report.

Zambia’s text message experiment is part of an international trend that is seeing medical services being provided via technology, with digitally savvy teens the quickest to adapt.

“The long-term findings on adolescents, health care and computer technologies is that they often prefer them to face-to-face communication,” said Kevin Patrick, director at the Centre for Wireless and Population Health Systems at the University of California, San Diego.

“They will more likely confide in a computer about sensitive issues.”

And as Zambia wrestles to shore up its overwhelmed health care system, inexpensive mobile technology could help ease the strain.

“Apps exist to help people locate the closest HIV testing site,” said David Moore, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, researching mobile technologies and HIV. “What if you could do something like an HIV rapid test using an app on your phone? That could be a game changer in terms of HIV incidence.”

11 years ago

Moroccan farmers reap rewards of mobile technology

In 2011, hoping to escape the brouhaha of the city, I retreated for a few weeks to an isolated inn somewhere in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. Each morning, I was offered a basket of delicious red apples as a gift from the locals. Delighted by their warm hospitality, I insisted on meeting them and thanking them in person. Finally I was taken to Miloud, the owner of a surrounding farm. Judging from the size of the land, I expected to walk through the doors of an ostentatious residence. However, I was shocked by the deplorable state of his mud house and miserable living conditions.

Puzzled by Miloud’s situation, I mobilised a small group of students and we conducted a field survey to decrypt how the owner of paradisiac prairies receives such minimal benefits. Our findings highlighted how the market prices were five times higher than those charged by the village farmers. Miloud, who had never left his small town, totally ignored most of the market realities which in turn made him an easy prey for unscrupulous middlemen who atrociously exploited his ignorance.

I returned to the village determined to get Miloud to increase his selling prices. The notion of change terrified the man because he feared losing his clientele under the impression that all his neighbors would continue to charge low prices. After a long and heated discussion about his situation and that of his children, Miloud finally agreed to gather the farmers of the region in his house with the goal of finding a reasonable solution to put an end to the clear exploitation they were experiencing.

The feelings of fear and inexplicable dread were shared by all the farmers, but they were concerned about the future of their families and hoped to offer them a better life. After paying a listening ear to their insecurities, I suggested that they put their harvest in the same basket, decide together on the selling price and never let anyone exploit them again. With the help of business students, we developed an action plan for the farmers’ co-operative Rhamna, and stayed in touch with them during their first two years of operation.

Today Rhamna co-operative has developed several added-value products and benefited from the support of the NIHD (National Initiative for Human Development). As a result, in less than two years the income of the farmers has jumped substantially by a staggering 70%.

Farmers harvest barbary figs, used in cosmetic and pharmaceutical products, on August 6 2011 in the Skhour Rhamna region near Marrakech. (Pic: AFP)

Miloud’s success story inspired me to start Fair Farming, an initiative that promotes fair trade and helps smallholder farmers derive maximum benefit from their products. Since its inauguration Fair Farming has partnered with several agricultural co-operatives and impacted hundreds of farmers throughout the country. Fair Farming has been awarded by the Global Changemakers program (British Council), and was adopted by We Are Family Foundation under its Three Dot Dash initiative.

Miloud’s continuous phone calls to update me on the success of Rhamna co-operative made me realise that farmers are not as isolated as I thought. They all had access to mobile phones that could serve as a door to crucial information. During the two years I worked with Miloud’s farming co-operative I continuously updated them on weather forecasts, market prices and best farming practices from the Ministry of Agriculture using SMS or the classic phone calls. The access to basic information helped the farmers take smarter decisions and thus boost their harvest and revenue.

I quickly realised the key role access to relevant information could play in curbing poverty in Morocco and other developing countries. Using a combination of SMS and voicemail we have, over the last few months, been able to reach to hundreds of farmers as a prototype for a scaling-up project that would hopefully benefit millions of farmers in the country.

Looking back at the modest initiative I started two years ago always reminds me that small actions can and will change the world around us for the better.

Adib Ayay has a passion for agriculture and business. In 2011, at the age of 17, he founded Fair Farming, a student-run organisation that seeks to help farmers boost their revenue using mobile technology. He is one of 10 young Africans shortlisted to be a One Young World delegate at this year’s summit. At this event, the M&G’s Trevor Ncube will be chairing a session on African media and what Africans think of their journalists. To share your views, complete this short survey.