Africa Monitoring System (AMS) for Sustainable Food Security

Photo Credit: TV Pro Gear An initiative being co-led by Conservation International (CI), the Council for Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR), South Africa and the Earth Institute (EI), Columbia University, has been launched with a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Africa Monitoring System (AMS) tool will track, monitor and diagnose agricultural…

Who wins: Rural Agriculture or Mobile Sector?

Is rural agriculture a big business opportunity for the mobile industry or the mobile industry is a big business opportunity for rural agriculture? This is the question that I continue to grapple with as I browse through presentations at the mAgri event during the just ended GSMA Mobile World Congress 2012 in Barcelona, Spain, and…

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 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…