Week 2 - Day 1, question 1 - 24 November 2008

There is an old adage which says seeing is believing.The impact of ICT can be felt by the user and here by small and marginal farmers.It can be demonstrated by capturing the preintervention scenario and comparing that with the post intervention scenario.There are so many factors which needs to be taken in to account for the success of the project.If it is not a lopsided project then the impact on the livelihood can be demonstrated to others.For example in eKutir project all the risks that a farmer faces have been factored so that a farmer uses this facility by paying a service charge.It has not only enhanced the productivity of the crops but also price realisation of his product.

Hi everybody there, We can take up some pilot interevention in certain agriculture clusters and outcome of the intervention can be compared with that of control cluster with similar characteristics with that of pilot testing area. The outcome in terms of economic benefits and other social impact can be publicised. Prior to the intervention priliminary survey has to be done in the pilot testing area to come up with a status in terms of economic and social issues and select few parameters like attitude, practice and knowledge etc. Impact of the intervention then be easily monitored during or at completion of the intervention. We are looking for taking up such activities at our end in Northeast India. I believe it may interest the forum. Dr. Monjul Islam Secretary Genreral FARMER

An important consideration in evaluating interventions is to consider the way that data is collected an interpreted. We are not just asking 'are mobiles beneficial?' - or at least I don't think that should be our question.Each project has a different model of what the mobiles are doing, who is operating the mobile, how people & organisations are working together, who is providing information and responses, how services are paid for, etc. At one level, we need independent evaluations of individual projects to inform funding decisions so that the "best" projects can be supported, extended & developed. But that work needs to be conducted by researchers who are able to understand the subtle technical, social & organisational differences between projects and between contexts. One thing we may want to do is to exert influence on network service providers to provide preferential rates (cf. the GrameenPhone model). At another level, there is the broader policy argument about getting funding for this kind of work. In this case, we may be competing with other types of agricultural intervention (e.g. price support, government agri extension programmes, input subsidies), or interventions in other areas (e.g. building schools or training health workers). I really don't know what we can do in that wider competition.

Hi from Hastings UK. Having a quantitative evidence base for monitoring and evaluating the impact of investments in mobiles in rural areas is important, but until activities are beyond pilot scale this is kind of data is probably going to be inconclusive. At this early stage to get enthusiastic support from leaders in all the roles you mention I am inclined to think that anecdotes are the best bet. This brings to mind a quote attributed to Tom Davenport by Patti Anklam in her book "Net Work". Talking about the measurement that kept early communities of practice sustained in the eyes of corporate bosses (before they could prove their return on investment quantitatively) Tom recommends the approach of "serious annecdote management". By serious I take this to mean rigourous, planned and tactical collection of stories of changes in real people's livelihoods. If these stories are woven in to rich and compelling narratives that will influence leaders to make the investments (social, financial, political) to get beyond pilots and begin activities at scale, then is the time to start collecting the baselines, setting indicators etc (ideally using a blended qualitative / quantitative approach like Outcome Mapping or Most Significant Change becuase of the complexity of livelihoods outcomes that you'll be seeking to understand).

I agree with Carl regarding the difficulties of doing impact evaluations for small/pilot projects. But unfortunately I am afraid anecdotes are not enough. Donors or Governments want data and prove that investments are somehow effective and productive. But then question is: what are good indicators for the evaluation of the impact of ICTs in rural areas? Then, which impact - economical, social - we want to consider?

I just posted under resources a [draft] Inventory of Innovative Farmer Advisory Services in Africa: http://www.fara-africa.org/media/uploads/File/Announcements/Innovative%2... What I did not mention in the report is the number of innovative and pilot projects which do not know one another (or would even ignore one another!). But still, some initiatives on rural telephony in the agricultural sector in Africa are a real eye opener. A number of coordinators of services mentioned in the inventory reacted with enthusiasm about projects they had never heard about before!

Hi all, from my perspective the impact assessment at local level should always start from the livelihood perspective (i.e. considering the social, economical and ecological dimension). Some weeks ago I read a paper which could interest you all, entitled "Can the ubiquitous power of mobile phones be used to improve health outcomes in developing countries? - There is mixed evidence to support the idea that mobile phones are an effective healthcare intervention in developing countries", which was written by W. Kaplan and published by "Globalization and Health" in 2006. Here you can find the link to the paper: [url]http://www.globalizationandhealth.com/content/2/1/9[/url]. Cheers, Simone

First of all I wonder whether it is all useful to focus on the mobile phone itself to measure impact? Isn't the mobile phone just an mean for another end? Wasn't that the mistake done by older ICT4D projects to expect technology will solve itself something? But let me add some other perspective. How about mobile phones themselves can make a difference to measure impact. One example is a cooperation between Voices of Africa, Mobile Reporters (http://voicesofafrica.africanews.com/site/page/mobile_reporters) and Akvo.org, an open source initiative for water and sanitation. On Akvo all kind of projects are presented and mobile reporters now report from the field about the implementation and the impact. Mobile phones and collective action or crowdsourcing have a great potential for transparency. There is a project called Ushahidi (http://legacy.ushahidi.com/), which made it possible by all challenges, that people in Kenya during the post-election conflict faced, to report through their mobile phone about the critical situation. This way they collected information from all over Kenya and documented incidents such as riots, deaths, property loss, looting, rape etc. This degree of transparency was hardly achieved by the media and certainly not intended to be publicised by the government. Now imagine the potential to measure development projects from a grassroot level. Or to collect information about how many governmental services have arrived in villages. This could be possible by harnessing the wisdom of crowd. * Using mobile phones to collect information. * Present all information on a website with maps and databases. * Use the website to connect the people who send information and aim to get more accurate information. Beneficiaries of projects could collect information in teams, send feedbacks to the platform and create their own map of development projects or their timeline with accurate information on how government services are fulfilling their duties. This kind of transparency should be an all-win-situation.

It obviously is subjective , but what we are experimenting is pricing these services. Even if the farmer is taking first time, more due to curiosity , next time he will not subscribe to it, if the service offered is not valuable. this is a simple measure tape that we are using in our pilot work in India.

Michael Riggs' question: [color]How can we monitor the impact [of rural mobile telephony in the agricultural sector] [/color]requires a better understanding of the farmers' context for the adoption and adaptation of an innovative information tool. There are many initiatives on ICTs and small-scale farmers in Africa. However, these tend to be un-coordinated, and information on the different initiatives is not easily accessible, let alone information on their impacts (see FARA inventory). The nature or mobile technology development for farmers itself is highly contentious and requires careful research and development to make it "right' especially when it comes to livelihoods improvement and poverty reduction in Sub-Sahara Africa. Although it is recognized that the uptake of promising information technologies like rural telephony can be influenced greatly by the availability and/or functioning of input supply, credit systems, land-tenure arrangements, organization of marketing, distribution of benefits, etc., such social-organizational phenomena have mostly be considered as conditions that hamper or enhance adaptation of rural telephony. When trying to measure the impact of rural telephony the question is thus not just to seek to develop an appropriate information dissemination technology but also to alter the boundaries and conditions that affect the space for change. Resource poor farmers in high risk and diverse, rain-fed environments face very small windows of opportunity for innovation. The mobile phone projects as listed in the FARA inventory often create special conditions to enable and stimulate farmers to utilize the recommended technologies (f.i. Questions and Answer Services - QAS based on text messages). Such special conditions might include access to subsidized inputs, guaranteed marketing of the surplus generated, the creation of special credit schemes, the availability of highly qualified staff or in the case of QAS accurate and timely information. But, equally invariably, such projects turn out to leave few traces after the special conditions have been withdrawn. Replicability of the development gains is a key issue. The best guarantee for such replicability is to ensure that new communication technologies work within the prevailing physical, socio-economic, cultural and institutional conditions and, if necessary, to stretch those conditions. This approach requires special procedures to adopt a new communication tool on the basis of decision making that is informed by an understanding of the farmers' context. [img]http://www.mobileactive08.org/files/images/STA40008_0.full%20view.JPG [/img]A good example is the adoption of mobile phone conferencing. In a video interview I took with Mary Nyakira of BROSDI/CELAC Uganda during the MobileActive 2008 conference, she explains how the mobile phone conferencing works and how farmers are enjoying it. It not only contributes to a particular form of democracy and transparency but farmers like having group discussions around a mobile phone with the loudspeaker facility on. The extension worker is "beeped" when the group of farmers is ready to start the training session. The discussions are a follow up on a previous field visit. But this time the extension worker gives advice out of his/her office. Taking into account the considerable distances and the fact that extension workers can not afford visiting on a weekly basis a particular group of farmers, mobile phone conferencing is having a tremendous impact. [url]http://farastaff.blogspot.com/2008/11/mobile-phone-conferencing-among-fa... Rural telephony technologies can only work if they fit within the small windows of opportunities that African small-scale family farmers face. As pointed rightly by Ravi Shankar - even if the farmer is taking first time a specific service, more due to curiosity, next time he will not subscribe to it, if the service offered is not valuable. Contrary to political activism in Christian Kreutz' example, the majority of farmers is not that well organized, they have no political clout and cannot exert effective demand on agricultural information services. Despite the number of Market Information Prices Services using mobile phone for price information dissemination the market prices information remain often not freely available so that prices are set locally and rather arbitrarily given the actual relative scarcity. More often than not, market prices are determined by the vagaries of weather, transport, monopolistic traders, and so forth. [color]Conclusion.[/color] In order to answer the question: How can we monitor the impact? We need to look into the broader innovation opportunities of farmers. To monitor the impact of the tool we need to look into: the most effective ways of reaching farmers with timely agricultural information and knowledge (indigenous and external); mechanisms for harnessing the potential of FM radio stations and digital telephony as technologies for communicating agricultural information; options for repackaging agricultural information and knowledge for small scale farmers; the potential role of and an e-repository (of local agricultural content) in Africa for purposes of disseminating local agricultural content. [img][/img]