Robert Owusu
Ghana is experimenting with a novel, ICT- driven means of agricultural information exchange. Robert Owusu is the Managing Director of Esoko, the mobile phone information system serving rural farmers in Ghana. He explains to AfricaSTI.com in Accra, the benefits of using the mobile phone service to improve agriculture and the livelihood of farmers. Excerpts:
Key issues in Ghanaian Agriculture
I am not an expert in agriculture but I know that most Ghanaian farmers are small holder farmers, and some of the challenges are : producers don?t know where to sell; the farmers find it difficult to sell what they have produced; traders don?t know where to buy; wholesalers can?t predict their supplies because sometimes you put up a factory but the supplies are not forthcoming; you produce today , you cannot produce tomorrow because there are no produce from the farmers. That also means government cannot plan for food security. All these because of something that is critical. And that is information.
So what we tried to find out the information needs within the agric sector or from the farmers based on our experience, we discovered that they will be asking questions like: Where do I get extension advice? What is the right price? Who is buying? Where can I buy fertilizer or farm input? What harvest will I get? Are the rains falling? Where are my customers? Where is my truck? Can I trust the buyer to pay for what they have bought? All this brings us to extension services: it?s about weather; it?s about input; it?s about processing; and it?s about transportation. Those are what they are looking for information for.
Mobile phones and information dissemination in Ghana
If you look at the mobile phone, the penetration is high, if you take for example, Ghana, the government of Ghana claimed that the penetration of mobile phone is about 80% that means that about 19 million Ghanaians have mobile phones . We don?t believe that, we think that it may be roughly about 60% or less because some people are using two ,three phones and they are in the cities but in terms of coverage of the mobile phone operators and where you can get access , mobile phone is more around within the country than any other commodity because it?s going faster than electricity, water, health, services and school. So if we use the mobile phone in disseminating this information, then, that will be a success and that is why we are beginning the Esoko. Esoko tries to bring how you can use the mobile to communicate and give information to farmers.
How Esoko works 
Esoko starts with price alert and what we do is , if anybody has got a phone , and he types in ?1900? and he puts in say, ?maize? or ?yam?, you can easily get the prices from the key commodity market in the country through the mobile phone right now as we speak, you can test it, or you do for rice, cassava, you will get immediate response. Apart from this, we also have farmers already programmed on our profile in the network on our platform. Those who for instance have selected their prices for maize, on weekly bases they receive the price. They want to know the prices on Wednesday because thy will be going to the market on Thursday, or they want to get the prices on Friday because they will be going to the market on Saturday. You can set that as an alert and the message will come to you through your mobile phone showing all the prices that are obtainable in the key markets across the country.
We are doing this by having about 33 agents operating in 38 markets around the country for all major agricultural commodities in the country. And in terms of the commodities, we are covering about 58 markets and recording data on weekly bases in the country, and we are also using the project trying to do a pilot in cape coast to know if there has been an impact on the people. And from what the farmers are saying, because now they have insight into pricing and what is happening in the market place they are saying they are able to improve their income between 25%- 40% but scientifically we have not bothered ourselves to find out if what they are saying is true or not.
Most of them are claiming that they are willing to pay for these services, but now it?s free so they may say they will pay but when it comes to paying whether they will pay or not is a different ball game. But at least that?s what they are saying. Most of them are also claiming that it is benefiting them but we will know when they start paying on their own because this project is being sponsored and we are supplying this information to them for free, this is so because you can go on our platform now and just sign yourself on the platform and you will see the prices alerts depending on the commodity that you select. But at now researchers from the New York university are now doing a study here in Ghana , they started last year, it will end in 2013 , that is when we will know if the mobile information on pricing have helped improve farmers income and their livelihood. The study is on-going, we will know when the result comes out.
How the mobile phone works with the Esoko
Beyond pricing, the mobile phone can be used in terms of trading, we have a system where if you have a ton of maize and you want to sell it you can just pick up your mobile phone and text in ?sell , maize, two tons? and this message will move into our platform and those who have been programmed on the platform to receive the messages will get the information that somebody wants to sell maize two tons at a particular price and this is his contact. So if you are one of the traders you can contact the person for negotiation on how to buy the maize. That is what we are using the phone to do. We also use the phone to send out information and news alerts or whatever is happening just by SMS push. We can send the SMS to the people who have been programmed on the platform. What we have is that if you are a researcher or you are doing any business, you just programme your members into cassava growers, maize growers, whatever you want or any way you want to classify them, you can classify them by districts, or by regions, so that if something is happening within a certain region you can easily transmit that message to that specific region, to those specific people who are on your profile on that network and use it to communicate with that target group.
The same platform can be used if you want to send coupon, instead of sending paper coupon, you can decide to use the mobile coupons and transmit it to farmers or anybody, also by a mobile phone. You can also use it to do simple polls, asking basic questions like, have you planted? Yes or No, if not when will you do that? This simple questions can also be used to do polls on the platform, you can also use it to give you stock alerts to tell you the stock you have in your warehouse or in the farm, you can use it to send alerts about transportation .
And for those of you who are researchers, you can do a small poll per say, send the reports just by SMS message to the recipient if the respondent have just respond the result can be capture if they are on the platform and the analysis will be done so it is very simple to use just because it has a very limited usage ,if you want to use a very large research that means you cannot use the SMS platform because of these limitations . You can use the Android phone or the Java application because they are smart phones and they have the ability to do more interactions that can be used for the Esoko.
On the challenges the mobile platform
There are some challenges in terms of using this platform, currently most SMS have about 169 characters but on our platform you can see up to 560 characters so anything beyond that, you will not be able to transmit that message on the platform and that is a limitation because you cannot use the platform to send much information but only about 560 characters.
You also need to rely on mobile phone operators to deliver the SMS message, in case the network is down, then your recipient will not receive the message and they may not give you the feedback that you need. There is also another limitation for mobile phone services, for somebody to use it effectively, the person must know how to read and write or interpret the message through the mobile phone and that is another challenge to most of our farmers around Africa because reading and interpreting the message you need some skills in doing that which is a limitation.
And when you do a poll by SMS, you send the questions, people have to respond, how do you motivate them to give you the response? If you are in the field it?s a face to face ,so the person have no alternative but to respond to what you have asked him but you can send an SMS to thousands of people but getting the response is an issue . So what we do is that when you send a message to people you tell them that if they respond they get a certain unit of a mobile phone credit, if you do that then you may get people responding if they have the ability to interpret the message and understand it then they can respond effectively to it.
In spite of this , based on our learning and experience in dealing with this project , we have realized that for any good market information system service (M.I.S) you need to address the needs of the target groups because if not, the message may go and they wouldn?t understand or read it. It should also be timely and effective in delivering the message to the audience, the technology should be easily accessible, the message should be clear and understandable and it should be localized ,relevant and customized. This means that you should use the language that the people understand because if they don?t understand they will not respond. It should be timely and accurate, it should be convenient and inexpensive. It should also focus on implementation, training reinforcement and marketing because if you have a product and you didn?t promote and advertise it people will not know.
Reported by : Abah Anthony John
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Posted by AfricaSTI on January 13, 2013. Filed under Interview. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry
Source: http://www.africasti.com/interview/how-the-cell-phone-is-helping-ghanaian-farmers
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