Over 500 000 rural farmers in India can now access free daily market information and weather services on their cell phones with the help of Intuit Fasal platform, an SMS based mobile service. Fasal begun as an experiment after it was recognized that rural farmers in Karnataka, India lack price information in relevant multiple markets; have…
Tag: farmers
Reflections on mAg. Services: Mistakes and Pitfalls of MNOs/NGOs
NB: This is my personal analysis of contributions to question six from the forum. This post is the final in series of six, analyzing each of the six forum questions that were discussed. Question 6: What are some of the common mistakes or pitfalls mobile operators or NGOs run into when developing these services? Below…
Reflections on mAg. Services: Content Sourcing, Quality Assurance & Dissemination
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…
Reflections on mAg. Services: Financial Sustainability
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Digitalisation and Smallholder Agriculture 