The Revolution of Mobile Phone-Enabled Services for Agricultural Development (m-Agri Services) in Africa: The Challenges for Sustainability

The provision of information through mobile phone-enabled agricultural information services (m-Agri services) has the potential to revolutionise agriculture and significantly improve smallholder farmers’ livelihoods in Africa. Globally, the benefits of m-Agri services include facilitating farmers’ access to financial services and sourcing agricultural information about input use, practices, and market prices. There are very few published literature sources that focus on the potential benefits of m-Agri services in Africa and none of which explore their sustainability. This study, therefore, explores the evolution, provision, and sustainability of these m-Agri services in Africa. An overview of the current landscape of m-Agri services in Africa is provided and this illustrates how varied these services are in design, content, and quality. Key findings from the exploratory literature review reveal that services are highly likely to fail to achieve their intended purpose or be abandoned when implementers ignore the literacy, skills, culture, and demands of the target users. This study recommends that, to enhance the sustainability of m-Agri services, the implementers need to design the services with the users involved, carefully analyse, and understand the target environment, and design for scale and a long-term purpose. While privacy and security of users need to be ensured, the reuse or improvement of existing initiatives should be explored, and projects need to be data-driven and maintained as open source. Thus, the study concludes that policymakers can support the long-term benefit of m-Agri services by ensuring favourable policies for both users and implementers

The Digitalisation of African Agriculture Report 2018-2019

An inclusive, digitally-enabled agricultural transformation could help achieve meaningful livelihood improvements for Africa’s smallholder farmers and pastoralists. It could drive greater engagement in agriculture from women and youth and create employment opportunities along the value chain. At CTA we staked a claim on this power of digitalisation to more systematically transform agriculture early on. Digitalisation, focusing on not individual ICTs but the application of these technologies to entire value chains, is a theme that cuts across all of our work. In youth entrepreneurship, we are fostering a new breed of young ICT ‘agripreneurs’. In climate-smart agriculture multiple projects provide information that can help towards building resilience for smallholder farmers. And in women empowerment we are supporting digital platforms to drive greater inclusion for women entrepreneurs in agricultural value chains

Report of the Task Force on Enhancing technology use in agriculture insurance

Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) is a flagship scheme of the Government of India to provide insurance coverage and financial support to farmers in the event of failure of any of the notified crops, unsown area and damage to harvest produce as a result of natural calamities, pests and diseases to stabilise the income of farmers, and to encourage them to adopt modern agricultural practices. The scheme is a considerable improvement over all previous insurance schemes in India and is heavily subsidised by the state and central governments. The scheme aims to cover 50 percent of the farming households within next 3 years. During its implementation in the last one season, several challenges relating to enrolment, yield estimation, loss assessment, and claim settlement were reported by farmers, insurance companies as well as the state governments. It was also noted that several technological opportunities existed for possibly leveraging support to the Indian crop insurance program for enhanced efficiency and effectiveness. NITI Aayog of the Government of India, therefore, constituted a Task Force to deliberate on this subject and identify such potential opportunities. This report summarises the recommendations of the Task Force. The Task Force constituted to address the issue of technology support to crop insurance comprised the following 5 sub-groups: (1) Remote Sensing & Drones; (2) Decision Support Systems, Crop Modelling & Integrated Approaches; (3) IT/ICT in Insurance; (4) Crop Cutting Experiments (CCEs); and (5) Technologies for Livestock and Aquaculture Insurance. Each sub-group had several discussions with experts in the respective areas, and submitted draft reports. More than 100 experts related to professional research agencies, insurance industry, banks, and the government contributed to these discussions. Technological options available in the country and abroad were considered by all groups. The Task Force together with the sub-groups then deliberated on key issues and formulated its recommendations as presented in this report. During the discussions it was realised that there were many administrative and institutional issues that needed to be addressed in PMFBY. However, the focus of the Task Force was on its main mandate, technology use in crop insurance. We hope these recommendations would help the Indian crop insurance sector take full advantage of the technological options suggested so as to increase its efficacy and effectiveness leading to reduced agrarian distress in the country

Can Smartphones be used as an information delivery tool in post-conflict context?

In areas where reaching out to rural farmers is difficult, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), such as mobile smartphones may offer an opportunity to share timely information on weather, markets, farm inputs, and research results to the farmers. Access to this type of information could potentially enhance farmers' farm productivity and their ability to make crucial decisions related to farm management in the face of climate variability. Mobile technologies have been identified as one way of easing information communication with farmers, especially in remote hard to reach areas. As in most African counties, the mobile technology sector is the leader in ICT development in Somalia, with approximately 7 out of 10 Somalis using mobile money services regularly. This creates and provides an opportunity for communicating and delivering information to farmers using ICTs technologies. What is not well understood is how ICTs, particularly smartphones, could be used as an information communication tool in post-conflict areas like rural Somalia. This study set out to assess the feasibility of using smartphones as a tool for delivering agricultural advisory information to rural farmers in the Afgooye district of Somalia. During a period of 11 weeks between December 2018 to March 2019, interviews were conducted with 30 vegetable growers and ten key informants. Individual interviews were carried out with the key-informants, while semi-structured questionnaire interviews were conducted with the farmers. The findings of the study revealed that the necessary enabling conditions for the adoption and implementation of the smartphone-based advisory system in the study area exist. Moreover, the use of smartphones among surveyed vegetable growers was influenced by factors like age, literacy level, and non-farm income source. Growers that had land title deeds, as well as non-farm income, were more likely to own a smartphone or to buy one compared with other farmers who rented land or shared their farmland. Furthermore, human security issues, as well as internet connectivity, were the main factors that constrain the access and use of smartphones in the Afgooye area. Mobile data cost was another factor stated by the farmers as restricting the optimal use of smartphones. The main conclusion of this study is that while there is a potential of using smartphones in the study area as an information delivery tool, there are both internal and external challenges that need to be improved. Specifically, many of the farmers identified security and credible information source providers as more urgent issues. Somalia is in the process of post-conflict construction, therefore, peace and security continues to be threatened by a range of external forces

Reshaping Agriculture and Development in Southeast Asia: An Experts Consultation Forum

The report documents the experts consultation forum on Reshaping Agriculture and Development in Southeast Asia held on 2 August 2018 at the SEARCA Headquarters, Laguna, Philippines. The forum aimed to distill from current developments and emerging scenarios the opportunities and challenges for direction setting and strategizing toward an integrated AD agenda in Southeast Asia to proactively address these rapid changes. Specifically, the regional experts consultation forum aimed for the following: Analyze opportunities and challenges for agriculture and development in the Southeast Asian region in the next 5–10 years; Calibrate the thrusts and themes where regional and national institutions and networks in Southeast Asia may collaborate and complement one another along the current and projected gaps/needs of the region in AD; and Recommend directions and innovative approaches in the pursuit of shared regional mandates, goals, and programs

Introduction to development engineering: a framework with applications from the field

This open access textbook introduces the emerging field of Development Engineering and its constituent theories, methods, and applications. It is both a teaching text for students and a resource for researchers and practitioners engaged in the design and scaling of technologies for low-resource communities. The scope is broad, ranging from the development of mobile applications for low-literacy users to hardware and software solutions for providing electricity and water in remote settings. It is also highly interdisciplinary, drawing on methods and theory from the social sciences as well as engineering and the natural sciences. The opening section reviews the history of “technology-for-development” research, and presents a framework that formalizes this body of work and begins its transformation into an academic discipline. It identifies common challenges in development and explains the book’s iterative approach of “innovation, implementation, evaluation, adaptation.” Each of the next six thematic sections focuses on a different sector: energy and environment; market performance; education and labor; water, sanitation and health; digital governance; and connectivity. These thematic sections contain case studies from landmark research that directly integrates engineering innovation with technically rigorous methods from the social sciences. Each case study describes the design, evaluation, and/or scaling of a technology in the field and follows a single form, with common elements and discussion questions, to create continuity and pedagogical consistency. Together, they highlight successful solutions to development challenges, while also analyzing the rarely discussed failures. The book concludes by reiterating the core principles of development engineering illustrated in the case studies, highlighting common challenges that engineers and scientists will face in designing technology interventions that sustainably accelerate economic development. Development Engineering provides, for the first time, a coherent intellectual framework for attacking the challenges of poverty and global climate change through the design of better technologies. It offers the rigorous discipline needed to channel the energy of a new generation of scientists and engineers toward advancing social justice and improved living conditions in low-resource communities around the world