NB: This is my personal analysis of contributions to question four from the forum. This post is the fourth in series of six, analyzing each of the six forum questions that were discussed. The fourth question for the forum was about financial sustainability. With a thorough discussion on partnership models in question 1, the focus…
Month: December 2011
Reflections on mAg. Services: Is there a Business Case for Serving Farmers?
NB: This is my personal analysis of contributions to question three from the forum. This post is the third in series of six, analyzing each of the six forum questions that were discussed. Following the first two discussions on partnerships and scale, the third discussion was based on justifying a business case for investing in…
Reflections on mAg. Services: Barriers to Scale
NB: This is my personal analysis of contributions to question two from the forum. This post is the second in series of six, analyzing each of the six forum questions that were discussed. One of the objectives of the mFarmer Initiative is to drive scalable, replicable and commercially successful mobile agricultural solutions that bridge the…
Reflections on mAg. Services: Partnerships Between MNOs and APs
NB: This is my personal analysis of contributions to question one from the forum. This post is the first in series of six, analyzing each of the six forum questions that were discussed. Partnership, being one of the key criteria for selecting mFarmer Fund beneficiaries, the introductory question (below) for the forum was about partnership….
Reflections on Mobile Agriculture Services: Blog Series
The mFarmer Initiative, a partnership between GSMA, USAID and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) in collaboration with e-Agriculture, initiated an online discussion late November to early December 2011. The 2-week forum which was organized around six main questions, touched on critical issues from partnerships, barriers to scale, business cases/models, content, and mistakes committed by…
The Debate over Intermediaries in Ag. Value Chain: E-TIC Project
For decades, the role of intermediaries between farmers and other stakeholders (researchers, policy makers, donors, etc.) has been key in the exchange of agricultural information, knowledge, innovation and other resources. The traditional intermediary role has been played over the years by the various national agricultural extension services but due to the challenges with this system,…
Is e-Krishok a Model for Scaling ICTs for Ag. Projects?
Integrating information communication technologies (ICTs) into agriculture is still a challenge, especially at the farm level in most developing countries. While the potentials of ICTs in improving access to agricultural information for these smallholder farmers is huge, the impact of the technologies on the productivity and living conditions of farmers is yet to be realized….
App for Ag. User-Generated Content Sharing?
Next2 is a “geosocial” network that allows people to automatically connect around location and by common topics of interest or concern. By sending a text message, a Next2 subscriber can signal what they have, want or would like to learn or talk about and Next2 automatically matches and then exchanges text messages between users based on…
Be Part of the Discussion on the World Bank’s “ICT in Agriculture” Sourcebook
The first in series of online forums to further develop resources for the recently launched “ICT in Agriculture” Sourcebook by the World Bank takes off on the 5th through the 16th of December at the e-Agriculture site. These discussion forums, available to all e-Agriculture community members, will be vehicles to inform the World Bank of…
Ripfumelo: “Getting to Zero” with ICTs
Initiated by the International Organization for Migration (IOM)’s Regional Office for Southern Africa and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through the President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in 2009, the Ripfumelo (“believe” in xiTsonga language) program is designed to reduce HIV vulnerability among farm workers in South Africa’s Limpopo and Mpumalanga…
Digitalisation and Smallholder Agriculture 