Selecting Mobile ICT Devices for Agriculture Services and Applications in sub-Saharan Africa

[Knowledge base]

The USAID FACET Project (Fostering Agriculture Competitiveness Employing Information Communication Technologies) project has created a series of Briefing Papers designed to help USAID missions and their implementing partners in sub-Saharan Africa use information and communications technology (ICT), through sustainable and scalable approaches, more successfully.

This paper compares ICT-enabled devices of value to access information and use ICT-enabled applications. The focus of analysis is on devices that are the most applicable, affordable, useable, and understandable to the greatest number of end-users—especially poor smallholder farmers. Given how quickly device options and prices change, this paper can only give a snapshot in time of current devices, but it also offers insights regarding how to analyze new devices as they become available.