In their recent report “Connected Agriculture,” Vodafone and Accenture with support from Oxfam outlined 12 opportunities that mobile telecommunication has for farmers. The opportunities were identified as ‘the most important’ through stakeholder consultations and are grouped into four categories. Category I: Improving Access to Financial Services through increasing access and affordability to these services tailored…
Month: November 2011
Nano Ganesh: A Mobile App for Remote Irrigation Control
Nano Ganesh is an innovation that is helping smallholder farmers across two Indian states to remotely turn their irrigation pumps ‘on’ and ‘off’ using their mobile phones. In an industry dominated by ringtones and games, this is a welcome move towards technology that serves development, said Vineeta Dixit, a principal consultant at the e-Governance Division…
The mFarmer Initiative: USAID joins hands with others for Ag. Devt.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in collaboration with Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and GSMA have launched a global initiative to facilitate the rapid scaling of the use of mobile phone networks to provide poor farmers with valued agricultural information. The mFarmer Initiative aims at developing a global, shared database of…
Information Revolution Changing the Face of African Ag.
A 2-day conference on African Commodity Exchanges has ended in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa with the call for an Africa wide commodity exchange as well as more exchanges in African nations. At the heart of this conference, even though not upfront, was the key role that information and communication technologies (ICTs) are playing in…
“Agriculture Goes High Tech” – A Decade of Digital Video!
It is over 10 years now that the Commonwealth of Learning Media Empowerment (COLME) program hit the media with the headline “Agriculture Goes High Tech With Digital Video”. This came up as a result of the success of their pilot project that used digital technology to produce farm instructional videos in Ghana and Jamaica for…
Farmer Innovations – The Case of Tanzanian Farmers & Smartphones
Through a collaborative knowledge base, farmers from the Chambezi region of the Bagamoyo District in Tanzania are using smartphones equipped with GPS modules and an application that makes it easy to send pictures and sounds to the Internet. The smartphones are used to document their daily practices, make reports about their observations regarding changes in…
Reforming Ag. Extension, One ICT at a Time!
Two recent case studies on some ICTs for agricultural development projects supported through the GSMA Development Fund – mAgri Program reveal an emerging trend within the broader Agricultural Extension Services (AES) and specifically in the developing nations, that worth commenting on. The revealing trend I’ve noticed, is that, either drastic policies and actions be taken…
Digitalisation and Smallholder Agriculture 