NB: This is my personal analysis of contributions to question five from the forum. This post is the fifth in series of six, analyzing each of the six forum questions that were discussed. With my interest in this area, I began the discussion with a post which pointed out the need to source content from…
Tag: agriculture
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 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…
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…
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…
“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…
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…
The Magic of ICTs: Rural Women in Agriculture
Let’s imagine the state of the global food security in the next 3-5 years, if rural women decide to back out of agriculture and food production today? Secondly, let’s visualize how access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) by rural women could reverse the negative impacts that this could make on the globe – that…
Digitalisation and Smallholder Agriculture 