e-Agriculture Explored

A survey of electronic farmer advisory services in Africa reveals both potential and limitations of voice, text, the worldwide web and mobile phones

The past 10 years have seen remarkable progress in the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in African agriculture, especially for facilitating farmers' access to market information. Farmer advisory services, both national and regional, are a promising new field of research and application in the emerging field of e-agriculture.

The Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) analyzed 60 farmer advisory services in Africa that are currently being designed, currently operating or recently terminated. The assessment tallied how many of the projects were implemented by, or in collaboration with, foreign organizations or institutions; the average duration of each project; how many were only pilots; where they were concentrated; and whether the services used local languages or only English or French. It then explored the impact of rural mobile phone services on agriculture, the ability of agricultural informatics to reduce the cost of acquiring information and influence decisions, farmers' capacity to use the information and the challenges to upscaling.

The study found that many initiatives were short-term pilot projects implemented by international organizations that often failed to survive after the original funding ended. It revealed both the potential of ICT for delivering information to farmers in innovative ways and its limitations. Many of the initiatives were institutional and specific to particular products and platforms, for example, a website on cotton using only English. The low literacy of many African farmers and their limited ability to use a foreign language, renders such models of information delivery largely ineffective.

Most initiatives have been web based or heavily text oriented, such as short message service (SMS) question and answer services. Seeking information from these platforms is an onerous task for farmers, as it entails plowing through many publications and consecutive text messages or surfing a large number of web pages. It is utterly impossible for illiterate farmers. Web- and text-based resources are nevertheless very useful, provided that an easy way can be devised for farmers to navigate them.

The most successful short message services are those providing agricultural market prices. Pilot projects abound. Esoko/Ghana - the African leader in market information systems - will present in May 2009 its new Esoko platform. It includes an SMS gateway with centralized computing power in combination with a mobile application, which can be adapted for a variety of tasks, such as conducting agricultural surveys and providing weather and market information.

One way to overcome the constraints of written text is to use pictures. INFONET (www.infonet-biovision.org), a web-based service promoting organic farming, has an innovative approach in which a rollover function causes information to pop up when the user moves the cursor over a photo. With the launch of a new online edition in February 2009, the service announced that it will test a built-in option for sending text to voice messages from web sites to mobile phones.

With the widespread use of mobile phones, voice solutions combined with SMS should find more use, as they offer easy accessibility. Kenya launched in May 2008 a farmers' information service (www.nafis.go.ke) that allows the country's farming community to exchange and receive through mobile phones timely news and information on agriculture, weather patterns, and related matters. The service offers agricultural extension information through both the web and telephones. As field extension officers update the system on the web, the same information becomes accessible by interactive voice response using any kind of phone.

In Zimbabwe, Freedom Fone (www.kubatana.net ) addresses communities' requirements for simple, affordable communication technology. Freedom Fone stores audio files in a content management system that is updated through a simple-to-use browser interface. These audio clips populate an interactive voice response menu that callers navigate for information.

One challenge facing mobile phone projects is that SMS can carry only a limited amount of information and requires basic literacy. Another is that voice-based solutions are complicated to develop, as they require machinery to synthesize speech, and cannot offer detailed information or pictures, as websites can. Voice nevertheless remains by far the most promising platform, as it can be customized for language and is readily accessible and very natural, offering direct responses to specific questions.

A comprehensive model is needed to address the limitations of existing methods by offering a holistic, one-stop information service on a variety of carefully integrated platforms. In addition, a model is needed that implements farmers' feedback to enhance information delivery.

No single system will ever meet all needs. FARA's research has found that systems using a voice platform or audio files effectively provide an innovative and promising entry point for farmers, while SMS and web-based platforms remain essential for providing more detailed information.