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….
Category: Extension Service
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…
12 Opportunities for Mobile Telecommunications in Agriculture
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…
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…
Africa’s Agribusiness Dream: How can ICTs Help?
Earlier this month, the Corporate Council on Africa (CCA) held its 8th Biennial US-Africa Business Summit in Washington DC. One of the key focus areas at the summit was the agribusiness sector in Africa with sessions and workshops covering topics such as “Winning for Farmer Entrepreneurs and Investors”; “Partnering to Build an Integrated Agribusiness Sector”;…
Digitalisation and Smallholder Agriculture 