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…
Tag: GSMA
Mapping ICT Solutions along the Ag. Value Chain
The agriculture and food security value chain system is known for its complexity with varied actors at various levels interacting among themselves and with their external environment to provide sustainable food security situation across the world. In this complex system, the key for success depends on how well the value chain actors collaborate and coordinate…
Mobile Agriculture to feature at the Mobile World Congress 2012
A panel on “Mobile Agriculture: The Market Opportunity” will be one of the highlights at the upcoming Mobile World Congress 2012 scheduled for Barcelona, Spain at the end of this month. This intensive panel session will cover issues on the immediate opportunities for the mobile industry to launch commercially driven services for farmers, and 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 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…
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…
Digitalisation and Smallholder Agriculture 