Question 1: Market Information - users of mobile technology

The ARD-Infodev team in the World Bank is delighted to join forces with e-Agriculture to engage in a series of discussions on how to improve small farmer access and use of services facilitated by ICT. Recent years have shown an increase in the need and interest by our partners in client countries to explore ICTs in agriculture. 

To respond, we pooled together the ICT in Agriculture Sourcebook containing over 200 specific case studies and good or promising practices across different sub-sectors in agriculture. While doing this work we realized how fast moving this field is, and how much knowledge and experience there already exists. We are looking forward to our exchanges and your inputs and comments during the coming 2 weeks on the theme of small farmer access to markets.

The ICT in Agriculture is a very useful reference for all of the practioners as well as policy makers.

Many countries are still struggling to integrate ICT enabled services in agriculture, and most are still struggling to come up with a Business Model. Based on our e-Krishok experience, we do see that PPP is the only proposition to make ICT services in agriculture sustainable. All stakeholders in PPP model have to ensure their benefits and create a WIN WIN situation, once the relevant partners are on board it has proved that the model works even with all operational complexity. In e-Krishok model, Bangladesh Institute of ICT in Development (BIID) www.biid.org.bd innovate the concept of e-Krishok (Electronic Farmer) and we have partners like Grameen Phone, ACI Limited and Katalyst by accomodating respective benefits of each stakeholder. Identifying right partners and facilitate their incentives are the major challenge to develop this kind of business model.

I believe that all categories/types of smallholder  - low, middle or high-tech farmers use and benefit directly or indirectly from market information through ICTs. But the question we are trying to address is the viable, sustainable and financially scalable deployments of ICTs in to these areas for agricultural development.

These factors are most of the time, only considered from the service providers' side - telecom company or agricultural partners. When we look at viability, sustainability and scalability of these projects from the smallholder farmers' side, we actually need to know what percentage is low, middle or high-tech to use ICTs for market information.

The percentage of these smallholder farmers to profitably use ICTs/mobile technologies is very low at this stage of ICTs innovation. The majority (low and middle-tech) is still trying to survive with their farm products and will use any means to avoid incurring market information cost in order to break-even. This is because the value of these services to them iis still vague.

So public-private partnerships (PPP) could help beef-up the campaign for quick adoption and use of these technologies to improve the living conditions of the farmers as well as ensuring the survival of the service providers. For example, piloting with toll-free calls at some areas to encourage farmers to call and seek market information (pull) or automatic sms to interested farmers about specific market information (push) could be used through PPP. While these services could be structured to benefit farmers according to their levels of production, opening it up to all could also lead to increase use.

Again, my argument is based on the fact that we have spoon-fed these farmers for such a long time with 'AID' and suddenly switching to business, could cost both - the farmers and the service providers.

Ben

Dear All,

In industrialised countries the average farmer has access to hundres of sites where they can access information about their market opportunities.  Producers have a host of service providers vying for their business..... and in doing so they deluge people with facts, figures and forecasts on the market.... This information wall has gone into hyper drive with the advent of ICT's.....

Why are they doing this? no brainer business thrives on information.  As has been noted by the previous writers, if you ask a farmer what they would like in terms of information they will ask for a wide range of topics.....  But what is the first thing that most farmers really want to know? 

I think its price first ! Having access to a reliable source of current price information is extremely valuable in making sales decisions and production decisions.  There is a lot more... but we don't have that yet????

Despite all the public investments in agriculture, the thriving private sector there are few emerging economy countries with really good basic price information services...  and yet we have access to a mesmerising range of technologies that could solve this issue.

As Judy has said, the Business model for supplying market information services (MIS) is a challenge, but there are many ways to make an omelette. 

I think we need to starting focusing.  I think we need to bring together clusters of smart people, from companies, banks, telecomes, Gov, civil society in some target countries, and work on using the ICT revolution to help us support some of the new ideas that are emerging in the MIS world.. 

There are already some very interesting ideas out there, i think we need to focus on integrating MIS into our investment DNA....  Where would you start????

This discussion thread includes many comments about the challenges of sustainable and scalable market information systems.  Here are a few more thoughts/ideas:

1.  The market price information has to be trusted -- and the costs for collecting such information have to be kept as low as possible to make a service have a chance at sustainability.  One idea that a sharp USAID implementing partner suggested is to try to tap crowd sourcing as a way to collect market price information.  This might also be used to hone in on trusted sources of price information that might become official sources (and paid) for a service.  I've never seen this tried but it intrigues me because it depends on the "crowd" to identify the price and the collective results it probably pretty trustworthy.

2.  On the revenue side, we have a few options to include in a business model:  direct subscriptions from farmers (I've seen this work only occasionally); subscriptions for associations or groups of farmers to benefit members; sponsorships from input suppliers; big buyers; others who want their brands known to smallholder farmers; sponsorships from government ministries that see that it is in the public interest to have such prices more widely available.  

3.  Another idea on the revenue side is something that Grameen AppLab has tried:  using those that disseminate information (Community Knowledge Workers, CKW) to also collect information from farmers, e.g., for household surveys, AG research.  Hence Grameen then has another revenue stream to offset the costs of collecting and disseminating the information.  

4.  On the revenue side -- to increase the value of the information service -- would be the idea to combine different information types together (e.g., prices, weather, tips).  Several services are trying this.  This information could also cover AG plus health information.  

At least in sub-Saharan Africa, there is not one proven business model we have seen that is working to scale.  Or?

Judy 

 Hi Judy,

Are you familiar with the Esoko platfrom out of Ghana? I believe they provide vetted produce prices via SMS and mobile.  Here is an example of their Ghana platform www.esoko.com/

Likewise M-farm out of Kenya is a new start-up that is providing market prices by SMS.  They are currently only serving one or two regional market areas but I do believe they are having some success.  Their web site is www.mfarm.co.ke/

Brian Puckett

Next2.us

The issue of which business model is still a challenge.  However, Shaun has provided some interesting way forward - putting smart people from various stakeholder institutions together. Although it has been suggested that tech is not a problem, its also important to have a directory of people who can build smart applications and have them availed to companies in the developing world that need to try out smart ideas. I live in Uganda and getting smart builder of mobile applications that interface with the web is a challenge. Already the mobile revolution has provided an opportunity to build business in the sense that payments can be made in micro units by users. Revenues can easily be collected and monitored. We also see that given the stiff competition by mobile companies, they would be more that willing to partner with serious content providers and probably engage in promotion activities also, as the market their produce.  However, this too has to be linked up with rural enterprise companies/NGOs that are going to facilitate marketing of farmer producers at competitive prices. The number of mobile users is growing very fast in Africa which is a great opportunity.

One other thing explaining the lack of a sustainable or working system today is that many MISs project were donor driven and during their lifetime, no serious attempts were made to sort of transit from public/donor to privately run and supported systems. There are many ideas today and what needs to be done is to sort of provide seed money to try them out with special focus on lessons learned and best practices, what works and what does not work in certain situations.

As we brainstorm on private sector involvment, we need also to remember the sort of market for this service which too provides some challenges. Ironically small rural farmers still have many issues to invest in to make their agriculture commercially competitive.  On the other hand, most traders do have their systems of obtaining price information. The other market segment would be academics, NGOs and Government. Interestingly, Governments already invest some monies in this service in terms of hiring personnel etc. This provides some opportunity to tap into this resource and hence private-public partnership where Government would play a leading role in collection or monitoring while the private sector plays a major role in dissemination. There can also be the issue of having a semi-autonomous body doing this rather than having it within government or government can outsource this function.  Indeed there can be many models that can be worked out and improved upon given the ICT revolution that has taken place.

 Kelly this is really good input. Shaun and Judy are also asking a lot of good questions and making great suggestions.  There appear to be three themes running through this conversation business model and then logically what information is of the most value as well as what is the next best case.

Business Model

With Next2 we have been talking to a lot of NGOs that work directly with smallholder farmers, primarily in Kenya.  In our experience couple things, SMS has been abused by scammers so most people (not just farmers) are skeptical of using SMS with people or organizations they don't know -- especially premium services.   Therefore, premium service are very hard to sell.  In the SMS industry in Africa people pay to send a text message. They do not pay to receive them.  So update for any service will be much much higher if there is no surcharge to send/receive from the service. But users will pay to send a text message to a service so the cost of gleaning data via SMS is low.

Our business model never charges farmers to receive text messages.  We provide way for content providers to quickly and easily provide content to their target audience.  We charge the content providers a small fee per text message that is sent out by SMS.  As our audience builds we hope to charge advertisers that want to target users by topic and location.

Data

Judy raises and interesting point about "crowdsourcing" price information.  I believe this informal way of getting useful information needs to be explored but most likely will be used along with more structured solutions.  With the message match technology we built into Next2 and we hope it will be used to exchange pricing information. Further, informal more unstructured approaches to information exchange may provide benefits and uses that are devised my farmers themselves and not forseen by system designer.

What's needed?

Shaun point about what is next or needed I think is also important and Kelly talks about this also.  Obviously, I am bias but what I think is needed is a platfrom in country that provides the tools and communication channels (SMS, Mobile, Web IVT) where content providers, business, entrepreneurs, government, and NGOs can quickly and cost effectively develop and deploy ICT solutions to users in one or more countries.  And, that is what we are trying to build with Next2.us.

Most projects seem to be doing everything.  Designing and developing technology, buying and building ICT infrastructure to deliver said solution and working to bring information/expertise sources and information users together.  There doesn't seem to be much, if any, cross poliination, or re-use or re-deployment or assets and expertise.

The mobile network in Africa is the first infrastructure that reaches into ever nook and cranny on the continent since maybe the drum.  There is huge opportunty to build cloud based solutions on top of mobile.  The best solutions will provide access to data via multiple channels (sms, mobile apps, mobile web and IVT).

Brian Puckett

Next2.us

Thanks Judy for sharing these options.

We have seen farmers usually habituated with FREE information provisions, payment for information is something really tough to introduce at this stage of socio cultural environment. Similarly, we have experienced that farmers can pay indirectly (via sms or for phone calls), specially local experience encouraged us to come up with a new project by introducing SMS based subscription to avail information & advisory services on agriculture, livestock and fisheries. If we can properly position the service and promote to the targetted customers, I see a potential solution for our long discussed 'finnancial sustainability' issue for similar kind of services.

Same time we are introducing market linkage services which will incorporate a Service Charge for registration and any transaction (i.e. sale) to establish a proper business model.

Let me share some of my expereince in working for a project called Katalyst (www.katalyst.com.bd). We have been working with the two largest telecom operators in our country, (Telenor and Orascom) to deploy two ICT based platforms targeting farmers. One is a telecenter led model and working with the mobile phone company we have succussfully launched 500 such ICT center acrosss the whole of Bangladesh. These center serve rural audience including farmers with range of service including agriculture informations; these center have been running commerically for the last 4 years. The other model is an agriculture helpline which is hosted by human agents, under a call center and operated by the telco itself as a value added service. This too has been running on its own since 2009 and has registered more than million phone call todate. (Although having human agents is more costly we had found from our research that farmers are reluctant to interact with IVR and SMS). To make the whole model more sustainable, instead of the project supplying agro contents, we have identified and developed ICT based agro content provider who have commerical agreeement with these telcos. Subsequent Impact measurement (which itself comes with a lot of challenges and was the subject area of our recent online collaboration with e-agriculture: http://www.e-agriculture.org/content/policy-brief-challenges-and-opportunities-capturing-impact-ict-initiatives-agriculture) has so far shown a significant number of farmers have benefitted in terms of better disease prevention, new cultivation techniques, better information on inputs etc.

We have tried to work with market price information but frankly speaking that has proven to be quite difficult. First of all, thanks to the high mobile reach, farmers do get to know the market price of different markets, however owing to logistical issues, they are unable to tap into these opporutnities. Second, market price is so fluctuating and different across different markets, credibility is an issue. We have had some success with a local software platform that was developed called cellbazaar (which allows sellers to post 'sell' information through phone) but i guess more work could be done here.