Question 1 (opens 25 Nov.) What are the main achievements in the area of ICT for agriculture and rural development...

There has been a tremendous increase in the adoption of mobile phones for delivering agricultural information services. A few case studies have been documented during the FAO's regional workshop on  "Mobile Technologies for food security, agriculture and rural development" (http://www.fao.org/docrep/017/i3074e/i3074e00.htm).

It is estimated that there are almost 6.8 billion mobile connections for a world population of a little over 7 billion. It has been mentioned the last 1 billion connections have been predominantly added at the BOP - people living below 2 USD $/day. People involved in agriculture and allied fields form a majority of these rural poor.

The opportunity that this provides in delivering information services to the people involved in agriculture is phenomenal. Access to the right information at the right time helps make informed decisions, especially for small holder resource poor farmers this has a enormous bearing on their livelihoods.

An in-depth insight into the growth of mobile phones is documented here : http://www.atkearney.com/documents/10192/760890/The_Mobile_Economy_2013.pdf

Gerald, you bring up a very interesting point on how mobile phones have become relevant to agricultural development. I would like to delve in on two  achievements that have been key in this revolution:-

1. The increase in mobile penentration in the past 10years; has consequentially led to an increase in mobile applications specifically designed for agricultural development. According to  http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2013.pdf
 mobile penetration stands at 96% globally, 128% in developed countries and 89% in developing countries. The number of mobile platforms developed and in use on the market to bridge the digital divide with smallholder farmers has also tremendously increased. There are applications such as Esoko see http://esoko.com, icow (www.icow.ke), rural eMarket, mFisheries,FarmerLine (http://farmerline.org), mFarms (http://mfarms.org), M-Shamba (http://Mshamba.net), Mlouma...and the list is endless as more apps are being developed. This means that there is a diverse range of information sources for farmers other than the traditional radio,tv,newspaper and extension agent among others as compared to 10 years ago. This does not necessarily mean that these applications have proven to be adequate in catering for farmers needs but it is a huge step towards integrating agricluture and ICTs.

2. It is also interesting to note that much of this drive in the development of mobile applications for agricultural development has been championed by young people; e.g. Esoko, mFarms, mlouma, mkulimaleo,M-Shamba are some of the many apps developed by young people. This is vital considering the fact these applications will likely be appealing to young people as well who are key in social and economic development. Infact in places like SubSaharan Africa where the world's youngest population is based; two out of three inhabitants are under 25years of age and where young people account for 65% of the agricultural workforce (seehttp://www.fanrpan.org/projects/youth-in-agriculture/ ); it is even more relevant to see more young people involved

Hi Rachel. So would you say that the involvement of young people in the development of mobile apps has been a success at this point? Or does there needs to be more work to empower young people to be successful in app development?

Thanks Geradsylverester for that report
But most of the farmers are not reached maingly in Uganda and since most of the agriculture is done in rural araes, few farmers recieve right information ant the right time. 

Dans le rapport "Les lions passent au numérique : le potentiel de transformation d'internet en Afrique", publié le 20 novembre 2013, l'institut de recherche McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) estime que la contribution d'internet au PIB annuel de l'Afrique pourrait passer de 18 milliards de dollars aujourd'hui à 300 milliards de dollars en 2025. Pourtant, tous les pays n'abordent pas la vague numérique de la même façon, ni avec le même enthousiasme.   
Aussi, un rapport publié le 12 novembre par l’Association des opérateurs mobiles (GSMA) indique que, entre 2007 et 2012, le nombre d'abonnés aux services de  téléphonie mobile au sud du Sahara a augmenté de 18% en moyenne chaque année, soit la meilleure performance au monde, selon ce rapport intitulé «Economie mobile en Afrique subsaharienne 2013.
En juin 2013, la région comptait 253 millions d'abonnés uniques aux services de téléphonie mobile, soit un taux de pénétration de 31%,  et 502 millions d'abonnements (cartes SIM uniques), contre 105,2 millions et 165,6 millions respectivement en 2007.
En 2017, l’Afrique subsaharienne devrait compter 346 millions d’abonnés uniques, soit un taux de pénétration de 37,6%.
Selon GSMA,  qui regroupe 800 opérateurs de téléphonie mobile à travers le monde, l'industrie mobile représente 3,3 millions d'emplois dans la région et 6,3% du PIB de l'Afrique subsaharienne en 2012, contre 4% en Amérique latine et à peine 1,4% dans la région Asie-Pacifique. Selon les prévisions de GSMA, l’industrie mobile devrait représenter 8,2% du PIB de l'Afrique subsaharienne en 2020.
http://www.agenceecofin.com/mobile/1311-15039-l-afrique-subsaharienne-la-region-la-plus-dynamique-du-monde-en-telephonie-mobile

Patrice Yapi N'CHO

Merci Patrice de votre contribution, elle est très intéressante. Cette fois-ci le forum se déroule en anglais mais si vous préférez de continuer en français on fera l'effort de vous suivre. Par rapport à votre commentaire, vous soulignez l’importance et la dynamique actuelle de l’internet et de la technologie mobile en Afrique mais nous aimerons aussi connaitre plus d’information sur sa relation ponctuelle avec le développement agricole dans le continent.

(In English)

Patrice Yapi N'Cho has shared interesting figures and documents related to the rise of internet and mobile phones uptake and usage in sub-Saharan countries. I am asking Patrice if he can tell us more about the way technology has made contributions to agricultural development in the African continent

All the data provided are very interesting and surely the rationale for all the interest related to M4D in general and m-agri in particular.
However, I would be very interested to hear in practice, what have been the impact of mobile on agriculture or on farmers? 
IMHO, looking back in the last 5 years is essential to understand where we are.
As mentioned in the question, i think it would be very valuable to hear from practionner what has worked and is working and what are the key points to take into account when developing a m-agri initiative.

From my own perspective, there are clearly 4 dimensions that are essential
-technology: what are technology, or association of technologies that are accessible and usable by farmers? 5 years back, SMS was ruling, now you see initiatives with SMS, IVR, smartphone apps, using social media etc. there is a wide range of options, and different applicability for different profile. It would be interesting to hear about experience on these different domains

-impact: it is good to have a technology, relying on mobile, that is working to bring information to and from farmers. But this is not the objective, this is just a tool. I would be very happy to hear from the audience which type of challenges the use of mobile in specific applications have helped solving (or didn't help)? in other words, examples of observable changes in either production sale, or overall domain organizations due to the use of ICT

-scalability: what works with 100 farmers may not work with 1 million. This has been an issue since day one of M4D in general, and it would be interesting to capture success and failures in that area.

-partnership: who are the key partners in successful m-agri initiatives? there are more and more startups (and competitions and hackathons etc.) in the domain of m-agri, but most of the time it is led by techies. is this right? any experience here would be interesting to be shared. 

I hope that the discussion will help us at the end to find the place of m-agri in the continuun that goes from "m-agri is useless for suporting agriculture in the developing world (or throwing the baby with the bath water based on failures)" to "m-agri is the solution to agriculture issues in the developing world (magic wand)"

steph 

No doubt there has been lots of applicaitons developed, and being developed, by the youth in the last 5-10 years, insofar as efforts to promote youth engagement in agriculture goes.

This session has presented very valuable posts, and referenced documents links that show the steps that have been taken to develop m-agri. A very good indication has been the engagemnent of the youth, as the sector seeks to engergise the agriculturally productive age of those working in farms (currently ranging from 45-65 as they own the productive resources).

My curiosity has been to find out if the  value chain model which places actors in their most comfortable productive pedestal, as they interact productively with those others in their levels of comfort may need to be highlighted. To back this up, the more subtantive question may be: has m-agri created a platform or framework that brings the youth and the farmer to a win-win plane of collabroation, with the youth specializing in apps development while the farmer pays for connectivity and supports production as they benefit from the market linkage potential from the apps?

Furthermore, there may be need to know if there are examples of institutional models that engage the youth in an agricultural production level/plane; so that they do not develop apps  to just win hackathons and competititons without traction with the ultimate consumer of the apps - the farmer.

Even if cases may not be cited, it may be very helpful to know from the techies if there are challenges of mutuality in collaboration, particularly in the development context that holds true in Africa, where land holdings are rather small. The youthful apps developers may need to articulate the challenges so that the WSIS+10 thinking is guided on the need to help plan and articulate the expectations and challenges of all actors going forward.

Kiringai

Hi
The opportunity that mobile phones are offering to us have to be complemented with another revolution:

We have to change the low impact created by a network of weather stations to the ICT revolution that can offer mobile phones with a network of monitoring and characterization crops using points with sensors of climate-soil-plant-nutrition and field data in representative agricultural farms with the main crop in the region.

This concept must be based on "sample" and characterize a number of individuals representing a population of plants and get the income of such plants, through technical and economic indicators in real farm practical conditions.

We will learn in real farm conditions cases of succed and failure and will be able to create alarms based in this experience with new different indicators (weather, plant-dendrometer-, soil moisture, soil nutrition and fiel data).

If we develop a weather forecast based in the real farm conditions we will work in a preventive way. For that we only will need weather data from the site and the "standard forecast" for the area.

This is an opportinity for engineers from the state, the minicipalities etc to focus in the new lenguage created by this new technologies based in new indicators that will let them to develop new alarms and App to make this local-knowledge to a bigger scale impact.

-scalability: Shoud be solved using remote sensing and data from field and with alarms created in this points with sensors and data from field from growers used as a crop reference in the micro-climate conditions. Example of one this projects: https://acceso360.acceso.com/cocacola/es-ES/?mod=TrackingAVPlayer&task=openAV&companyNewsId=203034774&mediaType=2&sig=5a2872ead73921f90e5bbc072e79872a61edb3a6020d148296861e4ea799282d
technology: we should work with phone preventive advises or alarms with SMS and easy calculations with Apps derived from the advise adapted to farmer crop and complexity of the problem. The alarm shoud filter the way we use Apps...
-impact: There is not too much impact yet with phone technologies as far as I see in practical agriculture in developed countries. This is the same problem we have using "alone" each new technologie (remote sensing, data from field, sensors, weather forecastetc) . We have to learn how we should integrate phone posibilities with other technologies that are arriving to agriculture.
-partnership: We have been working in precision agriculture in Spain for the last 10 years, with a main  focus in tree crops and we have realize that the unique way to solve growers problems using new tecnologies is integrating data from field, sensors, weather forecast and remote sensing. Each technologie solve only "part" of the growers problem, an specific perspective and we have the handicap that agriculture problems are really complex with multiple factors involved. we need to systematize and organize the data collection field to create a common language for each monitoring point. Phone possibilities is "another technologie" that should be integrated.

Hi Alvarez. Thanks for sharing this. It is quite an interesting system of technologies and information you describe. Would you tell us a bit more? Specifically:
- Is this something that is already in place and producing results? Or is it a goal that we need to achieve?
- Do you knkow of anything similar to this in a developing country? (As I understand you are talking about Spain.)
THanks!