Limitations of market information systems and of text/sms-based mobile-based services in rural agriculture
During October and November 2010 I had the opportunity to conduct a round of research in Kenya, working in collaboration with the Infonet-Biovision programme, an innovative and very comprehensive database of agricultural information available online and provided experimentally to a diverse group of grassroots extension agents across the country, preloaded on modified OLPC laptops.
The point I want to make has however very little to do with a specific technology or a programme. Spending time discussing with farmers' groups and with extension officers reminded me of something easy to forget when far from the field getting excited about the latest app or device.
No matter how important the role of ICT in agriculture, it is just one – important – layer of a much more complicated jigsaw. Digitising information, distributing it and creating platforms for users to interact is relatively easy. It is an ICT project, with technical challenges and mostly rational solutions.
However, managing to access real markets (as opposed to knowing where they are), obtaining adequate market prices (instead of knowing what those prices should be) are major challenges to rural agricultural development. Aside from their ICT “immaterial” dimension, they have many more tangible ones – for farmers, traders and trainers alike. The same could be said about accessing quality seeds, inputs and financial resources to implement new knowledge and innovation. The list could go on.
In Kenya and elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa small scale farmers often still struggle with generating sufficient value from their farming activities, because of a mix of factors, including lack of information on value-adding and limited access to market. Two examples I've witnessed can help clarify this complexity. Many of the farmers' groups I've visited appear to lack a collaborative approach to marketing their products and end up negotiating individually, almost at a loss, with traders at the farm gate, as opposed to building on their collective strength and volumes. This might tell us about the limited vision and business skills received by the groups – but more importantly about the lack of institutional support to generating consistent market linkages for small scale farmers.
In terms of training and innovation, the amount of support each group can receive from either state-run extension services or independent initiatives is minimal: lucky are the groups who receive a monthly visit from an extension agent. Aside from the controversy on the merits of demand-driven extension services, the reality is that agricultural extension services are poorly staffed and the logistics of reaching out to remote, rural areas is further complicated by inconsistent access to means of transport as basic as bikes and motorbikes.
Photo: Transport and market linkages remain major challenges for most small scale farmers, including banana farmers from the Osweta group in rural Kisii district
Within this context, ICT certainly helps in improving access to up-to-date information and training materials, as the Infonet project shows, and by facilitating the emergence of new voices and farmers' feedback in agricultural information systems. This is particularly true for mobiles – of course. After all, they're the first opportunity for the majority of rural populations to own or at least have access to direct, personal communication. And have dramatically lowered the barriers to connect people and ideas within rural and urban areas. Extension officers might be able to use sms to perform periodical follow-ups with the groups they have actually visited. Farmers can contact veterinaries within seconds as opposed to days – which is fantastic. But mobiles alone, and especially 20eu basic handset, don't fix structural problems of logistics, personnel and organisational structure.
While identifying the combination of most appropriate content and media platforms to distribute it with remains a key issue in ICT for agricultural development, there seems to remain a major disconnect between the development and provision of ICT solutions on one hand, and the lack of human resources and political will to support economical and social change among small scale farmers' groups.
The ICT layer of rural agricultural development, with its very important evolving debates on the complementary merits of radio, video or mobile learning, risks to be only marginally relevant if not embedded in a wider vision of a sectorial ecosystem facilitating access to all nodes of the agriculture value chain.
Too often the enthusiasm for the latest ultimate (mobile) device, revolutionary app, or sms-based market information system seems to imply it's that simple. I only wish it were.
Ugo Vallauri
PhD student
ICT4D Collective – Royal Holloway, University of London
You can follow Ugo on Twitter: @ugomatic
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Hello Ugo I think the reality, seriousness and how to address the limitations all depends on the nature of factors that keyed in to produce a prevailing impact of social and economic significance. The following is our dilemma and how we intend to curve around it. The findings from your work on the Infonet-Biovision programme in Kenya represents same situation smallholder farmers are facing in Kano state, perhaps all over northern Nigeria. But after we fully identified the constraints as value addition and access to real markets, in local context there is added problem of farmer computer illiteracy, eroded state extension service, and diminished functional research as well as institutional weaknesses in enhancing the capacity and capability of the farmers. You see, we are talking of nearly more than 80 million smallholder farmers across the country who need information, knowledge and source of funding whether it is loan, subsidy or grant to challenge climate change, food security and new agriculture paradigm. Going by output the farmers’ production at harvest period is commercial when mobilized together. Based on the huge local population there is need of a system that creates business opportunity in every aspect of the aforementioned problems faced by the farmers at the same time the system operates mainly to serve farmers with good farmers’ representation within the system management. So to address instituional issues of ICT in the value chain for all agricultural commodities under the system a public private partnership is required while for business development services a business joint venture with private firms is the vital link to adequate markets for the smallholder farmers. Conclusively, we float a private commercial company called Kano Agricultural Trade Centre (KATRACEN) to create trade opportunities through provision of business services along the value chains focusing on production, the farmers, supply chain, value addition and domestic and regional markets. Under this arrangement ICT deployment has many components including computer and Internet training, m-agriculture extension and e-agriculture interaction which should in the long run leads to producing individual oriented farmers that use application tools and the innovative and very comprehensive databases of agricultural information available online. rabiu
The Mobile phone today is the most handy ICT artefact that is used by people from all walks of life. Financial institutions and hospital authorities having understood this simple reality get in touch with their clients by delivering timely SMS content to their mobile phones.
The success registered by these institutions has kept NGOS and researchers wondering why this technology hasnt been successfully grafted to address the information lack amongst farmers and hence take them a step further away from the poverty jinx.
If the assumption that information is power were anything to go by,and that informed farmers ( one with access to information about prices, markets , good farming practices etc) were twice as likely to take action based on available information and enrich himself/herself as opposed to their counterparts without similar information, one would expect to have seen a semblance or some proven SMS based platform dedicated to addressing farmers' problems.
To this moment the success stories of SMS usage in the banking and health sectors wait to be replicated within the agricultural sector.In the meantime, middle men shall continue to exploit this information dearth to dupe farmers and consumers,and enrich themselves while the hardworking farmer languishes in poverty.
Granted, studies have been carried out with a view to bridging the information gap so that all the stakeholders involed in agriculture (farmers, consumers, middle-men etc) benefit, but this has always been a difficult exercise. Our experiences at AMIS-CAMEROON were that while it was possible to collect information on commodities,prices and markets (demand) it was very expensive to distribute the information to everyone in the chain.
Since 2008 we have worked on the premise that when every stakeholder knows the trending price for a particular commodity, the bargaining that ensues between middle men and farmers shall be based on mutual knowledge and not exploitation. So even farmers who negotiate with traders at the farmgate do so with an advanced knowledge about the trending prices and hence doesnt feel exploited.
We are convinced that the one reasonable way to address the cost of distributing the information we collect is to get the local Telecommunication Providers involved so that they cooperate with us and facilitate our getting the information to the farmers.
Three weeks ago while I was in Cameroon I tried negotiating a bulk SMS deal with a telecommunication Provider, but they would rather sell the package to me so that I in turn resell to my end users at a loss! I found it ridiculous when the marketing department tells me to buy bulk SMS at $1000 and then resell at $700 dollars! This represents both a poor marketing strategy and a clear statement that some Telecommunication Operators whom we count on simply dont care about the plight of the farmers.
From my perspective, and I am convinced many other social entrepreneurs would agree, the main reason why Mobile Phones and the Distribution of SMS Content in agricultuture suffer these setbacks is basically because most mobile operators refuse to carry out their corporate responsibility vis-a-vis the populations that use their services.
Give Actors the Capacity to Send out Bulk SMS to their end users and they shall transform the farmers' mobile phone into an active information hub to enable them fight poverty.
By Tambe Harry
Thanks, Harry.
Part of the difference between the success stories of banking and agriculture is that at the end of the day banking as a service doesn't require the transfer of goods. Additionally, the banking sector doesn't have to deal with the perishable nature of a lot of agricultural goods, not with very specific demands for information that vary depending on the season, region, and type of farming involved. So, aside from having to disseminate a lot of information, there is the issue of matching information needs with suitable answers.
As you noticed, there is a massve gap in between obtaining some information and being able to use it - or even in deciding that it's useful at all.
As for bulk SMS, prices will continue to decline. One solution might be for you to consider mass sending via FrontlineSMS using the Internet and online SMS providers who can be cheaper than mobile telcos in some market - but I don't know whether this would apply to Cameroon.
This comprehensive article is full of timely information and it is very well-written as well. I hope that the right answers can be found and that with the growing technologies we don't forget the basics!
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Thanks a lot, Shannon!
I agree it's important to keep things in perspective. For new communication technologies, it's helpful to place them in a continuum with previous innovations, with an emphasis on the historical contexts of the areas where they are introduced.
Hello Ugo, I appreciate your comments on the limitation of market information systems in Africa. I would like just to add something that astonished me on the field during some conversations I had with farmers from the Boucle du Mouhoun region in Burkina Faso, in 2009.
I used to think that access to relevant market information would always be a benefit to small farmers in the region. Better informed about prices on different markets, they would be better prepared to negotiate prices with traders, I thought. I came though to understand that sometimes small farmers in this region are caught in a kind of dependence trap vis-à-vis local traders. Once small farmers may need financial help during the next agricultural campaign, and once they have no other option beside local traders to get some help in such cases, in the moment of selling their products these farmers may just not be free to choose where to sell. If a farmer has got a good piece of information and decides to sell his/her products with another trader, the next time he/she will be in need, the local trader will most probably refuse to lend him/her some money arguing that he/she has not proven loyalty.
In such cases, access to relevant pieces of information are just not sufficient to guarantee the equity in the trade relationship. It seems to me that, in order to avoid this kind of trap, and to make relevant pieces of information - such as prices - really useful to small farmers, one good answer is farmer groups. Members of such groups seem to be in much better conditions to benefit from market information. That’s one of the reasons we, at foundation FARM, think strengthening these professional organizations is so important.
Cheers,
Eric Pasquati
PhD student at Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense
Thanks a lot, Eric - and apologies for taking *forever* to reply.
I agree with you on the complex relationship between farmers and traders. This resonates with some of the findings of the Running Out of Credit paper by Thomas Molony. There are multiple reasons guiding farmers' choices when in comes to selling their products
In terms of farmers' groups, in principle I agree that they are an important dimension to facilitate farmers' collaboration. In my experience however, the existence of a nominal farmers' group doesn't necessarily translate in our understanding of a collaborative group, collecting bulk products from all members to improve their barganing power with traders. I have come across a number of groups in Kenya that were falling in the same trader "trap", despite attending trainings as a group. I will share an example: during a visit to a farmers' group in Central Kenya, I met farmers engaged (among other things) in the production of macadamia nuts. The farmers were aware that the price of the final product sold in supermarkets across the country is approximately 100 times the price they are paid. Despite this awareness, they are not collecting all the macadamia nuts from their trees and nominating one member to take them to Nairobi (3 hours away, on good roads), where they're processed. Instead, they have traders come and collect the nuts directly from the trees. Why? This has nothing to do with mobile phones.
So, groups need further support - but groups operate with very different agendas, goals and methods.
Hello Ugo,
I agree with your findings in kenya. I think what is needed is an information matrix that integrates all players in market information provision as ICT based modes alone cannot be sufficient.
In addition, rural farmers may access the information on various markets with better prices, but other things hinder, for example the calculation on transport costs to the markets among other costs at the market may discourage the farmer, who may opt to wait for the middle men at farm gates.
Therefore, such an initiative needs to be accompanied by overall development in terms of good roads to enhance accessibiity to markets.
Regards,
Wanjiru Muriithi
MA student, University of Nairobi
Hi Wanjiru,
Thanks for your comment and sorry for the delay in replying!
Better road networks and transport costs are important factors. However, as I wrote to Eric, these problems can't account completely for farmers' lack of access to the market. Bsed on the feedback I gathered from some farmers in Central Province, at least for some commodities, traders' networks are rather closed. There is certainly a lack of transparency - both for farmers and for consumers as well.
Imagine a situation whereby for every mango you buy, you knew exactly where it was from, what the farmer earned, the trader earned, the transportation costs, etc. Would this improve consumers' position in making choices? Would it open up new opportunities for "good", less greedy traders to work in partnership with farmers? Not easy to answer, but these are interesting hypotheses to explore.
Regards,
Ugo
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