Study finds mobile phones empower rural farmers.
As mobile phone numbers in rural areas grow, farmers stand to gain if pathways for direct contact with agricultural scientists and experts become established. In order to test these assumptions, World Agroforestry Centre scientist Kenneth Masuki conducted a study in Uganda looking at the effectiveness of mobile phones for agricultural information dissemination. The study has tentatively affirmed the assumption by observing that phones facilitate farmers’ access to markets as well as build social capital.
Dr Masuki's research aimed to gauge the effectiveness of mobile phones for natural resource management and agriculture information dissemination to farmers in south western Uganda. During the study, the Rubaya sub-County telecentre was given a base station and farmers in each parish were given mobile phones. The usages of these mobile phones were recorded by usage tracking forms. Usage was recorded either as social, market, natural resource management or agricultural.
Peak usage for the mobile phones coincided with planting and harvesting. During the planting season most of the mobile use was used for enquiring about crop plantation time, where to source seeds and what types of inputs to buy. During harvesting, most calls related to about finding out about prevailing market prices.
Interesting the study found males dominated phone use for social purposes and for doing market research while females used the phones primarily for natural resource management and agricultural enquiries. Dr Masuki says this presents opportunities for targeting natural resource management information.
Through the duration of the study, 80% of farmers said the use of phones improved their livelihood. In each area, the study found that social capital was increased, typified by the establishment of potato collection centres (market bulking). Directly coming out of market bulking was the opportunity to establish links with new buyers. Secondly, market bulking seemed to have brought with it small businesses such as local airtime vendors. The mobile phone made it very easy for farmers to get market prices for commodities and to network with other farmers to collectively negotiate better prices from buyers.
The findings showed that rural communities appreciated the use of phones as an easy, fast and convenient way to communicate. Several questions do remain, such as: How do airtime costs impact the farmer's profit margin? For lobbying purposes, is the data and study robust enough to be used for advising government and NGOs? Can such small area trials be successfully scaled up without cost blow outs? Dr Masuki's study found that farmers found it challenging to navigate the phones and this was compounded by literacy deficiency and poor network access in some areas.
"When challenges are eventually overcome, ICT will be an integral part of agriculture giving farmers practical information such as weather updates” says Dr Masuki.
Some suitable strategies for making full use of mobile phones for agriculture could include a focus on encouraging young people to take up formal agribusiness practises. Dr Masuki suggests that it's vital that researchers discover ways for capturing lessons learnt from studies such as his and other best practises regarding ICT implementation for agriculture. The overarching challenge will always be the issue of how to scale up pilot studies and as Dr Masuki seems to suggest, "scaling up will be effective only if mobiles supplement already existing best practise farming methods” such as agroforestry-driven Evergreen Agriculture.
