Tag: Agriculture

An Integrated ICT Approach to Solve Agriculture Challenges in Bangladesh

mpower_ag

In last two and a half years mPower Social Enterprises Ltd has been working with Dhaka Ahsania Mission and Care Bangladesh to implement an USAID awarded five years ‘Ag Extension Project’ which aims to strengthen the agriculture extension system of Bangladesh.

Being a technical partner of this project, mPower is focusing on some of the key challenges in the present agricultural eco-system and trying to develop some integrated ICT based solution to cater these challenges.

Challenges in present Ag Ecosystem of Bangladesh

  1. Limited access to extension agent: One of the primary challenges of the agricultural ecosystem in Bangladesh is the absence or limited presence of expert consultation in rural vicinities. Although there are almost 14 000 government field extension officers, each extension agent has to assist more than 2 000 farm families in his area. Given the working hours, the logistical constrains, the geographical context and the available resources, it’s a mammoth task for each extension agent to provide adequate support to all the assigned farmers. As a result, farmers are forced to take advice from people who are not experts and are prone to be misled or exploited, which hampers the overall productivity of the country and negatively affects farmers’ livelihoods. In addition, female farmers are often left out of the traditional extension system: because of gender barriers, many times female farmers do not interact with male extension agent.

  2. The challenge of keeping up-to-date the Knowledge base of extension agents: Like many other domains, agricultural knowledge becomes outdated quite qulckly and it is often hard to regularly train extension agents working in the field with up-to-date information. Moreover, currently there is no specific mechanism in place to regularly train extension agents after a certain interval in a proper learning environment. In addition, in the field extension agents are not equipped with any sort of tool or materials that can be used to improve their service delivery.

  3. Decision-makers have limited tools to collect real time information from the field when taking timely decisions: Extension agents in the field collect and prepare a massive amount of ground level data, such as crop statistics and visit log, which is vital for managers and decision makers in order to plan future activities. Currently data collection is done through a traditional paper-based system, and therefore aggregating all the data collected requires a big amount of staff time. Hence, when it comes to management level, which is far from the ground, it often takes more than fifteen days to elaborate data from the fields, and this means that decision makers have very little time to send out meaningful and effective instructions in emergency situations such as floods and other natural hazards.

To solve these three specific issue, mPower has developed in integrated ICT approach which includes a big amount of mobile and web apps, multimedia content for mobile phones, and even community radio programs.

To solve the very first issue, the lack of extension agents, mPower has developed a community based, infomediary driven approach.

In each of the farmer group, the community selects an ‘ICT Leader’, a member of their community who owns a smartphone. These ICT leaders are trained by the project and they are provided with a mobile application named ‘Farmer Query System’.

When farmers in the community face a particular agriculture challenge, through this app the ICT Leaders send the details of this problem to a call center where expert agriculturists respond to the query through a phone call, becoming a virtual extension agent. Currently the infomediary are not paid by the project and not given any phones. The social incentive of using this system to solve other farmer’s problem actually motivates them to do this work.

Though, we are also trying out various revenue models so to give as well a financial incentive to the infomediary. Moreover, female farmers are also more prone to get reliable and certified agricultural information as the person who is sending the query on her behalf is community member himself.

Agriculture Knowledge Bank, an online repository of agricultural content which can also be accessed through mobile app, has been developed in collaboration with various government research institutes and extension department of Bangladesh in order to solve the challenge of updating the extension agent with most recent knowledge.

Many research agencies in Bangladesh produce a lot of content which is stored in their own website. Existing rural telecenters, innovative farmers or extension agent who tries to use ICT or mobile web to extract information from web, often face a hard time because for a single piece of information they often have to roam through multiple government websites. Hence this knowledge portal, which is also linked with learning tools and powers the various diagnostic tool, aids extension agents to learn more about each of the topics with updated information.

To automate the reporting and data collection process of extension department which is challenge three, mPower, in collaboration with extension department of Bangladesh, has developed three mobile application which automate their scheduling process, statistics collection and problem tracking, with the positive result of eliminating a lot of paperwork.

This data are being automatically aggregated in real time, and managers sitting remotely can see the view in a web dashboard and can give timely and meaningful forward instructions.

Results and Learning

  • Up to these point, so far 93 users are using these applications and so far 4 970 agro advisory service are being provided.
  • Farmers are in general very receptive to the recommendations they have been getting from this ICT based system. So far 96.4% of farmers responded that they are happy with the recommendations received, and they have applied practices . To find out adoption and impact more, mPower is working with a team of researchers from iCHASS,
  • So far 10.04% female farmers got agro recommendation through this systems which is a vast number, considering in traditional system the number is very poor
  • Some of the e-Administrative application which are targeted to government extension agent are yet to show significant impact as it’s tough to train field extension officers with a new ICT based tool and replace the old paper based method
  • Finding out female infomediary seems to be a challenge due to gender barrier and project is working with INGENAES to develop a strategy to tackle this issue
  • Involving community people increases ‘trust’ of the recommendation
  • Apart from social value, to find out sustainability some revenue based model is required for the infomediary

Thank you for taking some time to read through this blog post. Please feel free to share and circulate this message. We look forward to hear your feedback and comments!

Sadman Sadek currently working with mPower Social Enterprises Ltd. as Technical Coordinator in Bangladesh

Pakistani Farmers Need Better Agriculture Content to Increase Productivity with ICTs

farmer

Pakistan’s agriculture sector employs over 40% of the population and contributes to 21% of the GDP. Other sectors are directly dependent, with the textile industry including raw cotton, contributing 11% of the GDP. Despite this importance, the sector has been struggling due to underdevelopment. Land rights and irrigation issues are clear policy and community issues. However, proper soil maintenance and low crop yields can be solved through working with farmers.

What are the main challenges that farmers face?

Crop yields have been low with stagnant growth since 1999. Pakistan’s production is 40% behind its neighboring countries. The harvest often goes to waste due to weak storage and transportation methods. Farmers are competing with large-scale agribusinesses that have access to resources, education and information. While extension programs send workers to educate farmers, most farmers view the programs as ineffective in disseminating information. The extension workers are often poorly trained and it is expensive for the workers to access many villages.

What current solutions are available?

USAID has partnered with Telenor, a telecom service provider, to provide mobile banking, information on weather and market prices to 1,700 farmers. mAgricorner is one of the first mobile apps focused on Pakistani farmers. It provides market prices, farm advisory and trading. 4 out of 5 telecom providers in Punjab have agriculture services using interactive voice response (IVR). Also the government began using satellite imagery to predict crop yields in the upcoming seasons.

What are the attitudes toward technology solutions?

A research study by CABI surveyed farmers in Punjab Province, one of the most fertile and populated regions in Pakistan. The farmers proved most interested in receiving voice calls and text messaging. Despite the stereotypes of most farmers, they are eager for more experimentation with ICT and agriculture.

What are the concerns moving forward?

A main issue is quality of content. Many farmers haven’t used the existing tools because the content quality is low. They often find the information too general and not relevant to their region and type of farm. Also, there is low market penetration of such tools even in Punjab. Although the government is launching satellite data initiative, the focus is to prevent food shortage through better import estimates not increasing crop yields. While there is significant research being done by the government and NGOs, there needs to be stronger focus on ensuring that research is utilized to increase agricultural productivity.

Angelina Nonye-John is a researcher and writer with Mansa Colabs

Can a Mobile App Foster a New Green Revolution in India?

india-farmer

For the past decades, the share of agriculture in the Indian economy has kept shrinking. Even though the sector now accounts for 17.4 percent of the country’s GDP, it still employs 263 million people. That is, 22 percent of the Indian workforce.

Low productivity

Since the Green Revolution in the 1960s, India’s production of food grain has increased fivefold. The country is now self-sufficient, but it is facing a major productivity issue. It is still far below that of China, Brazil, or the United States.

This situation is the result of several factors:

  • India’s agricultural sector is fragmented. 78 percent of Indian farmers own less than 2 hectares of farmland. These small farms are often over-manned and quite unproductive.
  • Irrigation facilities are inadequate. Only half of the land is irrigated, and many farmers are dependent on rainfall to grow their crops. This makes them vulnerable to climate-related risks.
  • Modern agricultural practices have not yet been adopted by a majority of farmers. This is due to a low level of awareness, high implementation costs, and impracticality in small farms. The government’s large agricultural subsidies also tend to hamper productivity-enhancing investments.
  • Finally, many small farmers are uneducated and therefore risk-adverse. Even when they are exposed to the latest agricultural approaches and techniques, the majority won’t adopt them. Too often, they find them too risky and they would rather rely on traditions than try new farming practices. That way, they won’t maximize gains, but they believe they will minimize loss.

Mobile revolution in India

Anand Babu C. and Shita Lotivakari are well-aware of the situation: their own parents were farmers. But after working for ten years for international companies, they also understand the potential of ICTs to improve the life of small farmers in the long run.

In India mobile phone penetration is up to 90 percent. More than 900 million people have a mobile phone, and an increasing number is switching to smartphones. In the countryside in particular, the mobile revolution has already had a great impact. Rural Indians can more easily communicate with their relatives living in the cities, and they have an increased access to the outer world.

For Anand and Shita, they can also play a major role in boosting agricultural productivity. In fact their dream is to leverage mobile technology to fill the information gap, which they think prevents farmers from improving their practices. That’s why the two entrepreneurs started Jayalaxmi Agro Tech in September 2014.

Breaking the farmers’ illiteracy barrier

Anand and Shita’s idea was to build on existing services. In India, several companies already provide weather forecasts and market prices to farmers. The problem is that they do it using text messages in English. Since most small farmers are illiterate, these services are not so much of a help.

The two entrepreneurs thought through this illiteracy issue over and over, and they reached two conclusions. They agreed that using mobile phones to provide appropriate and timely crop-specific information is a great idea. But it is critical to develop easy-to-understand content; otherwise farmers will not use it.

Anand and Shita boldly decided to go for a mobile application. This is, indeed, the most appropriate solution for farmers. With an app, they can offer them both audio and visual content in English and several regional languages. And everything is available offline.

30 crop-specific apps

banana-app

So far, Anand and Shita have developed 30 applications for agriculture, horticulture, and animal husbandry. Today Jayalaxmi Agro Tech’s applications provide information about specific crops (e.g., banana, pomegranate, potato, onion, etc.) as well as dairy farming and sheep rearing. Each of these apps aims at helping farmers to better manage their farm and boost their productivity.

So what does happen when a farmer downloads the banana app on his smartphone? First, he gets information about the existing varieties. He learns where bananas should grow and how he should irrigate them. He also receives reminders on when to apply fertilizers. He is even taught how to control the diseases through a decision support system. The whole content is illustrated with pictures and descriptions in his mother tongue. So it is easy for him to understand and apply even complex notions.

In only eight months, more than 50,000 farmers have uploaded Jayalaxmi Agro Tech’s apps onto their smartphones. And since all these applications promote sustainable practices, they may pave the way for a new agricultural revolution in India!