Question 1 for discussion Monday 17 Nov.

My observation here in Ghana is that people in the rural areas use mobile phones to access and/or disseminate agricultural information. The TradeNet platform for instance (developed by busylab) has helped farmers to display prices of their agric products online and can be accessed using the mobile phone, so that you a text message away from finding competitive prices for farm products you may want to buy. Generally, the mobile phone has improved communication for farmers and other professionals in the rural areas and means increased business activity.

:) [color]I feel mobile phone alone may not be an effective tool for achieving success in the transfer of agricultural technologies.Other conventional and novel tools must be integrated for a holistic development.Before assessing the success factors,we should have identified the parameters or aspects of development of rural areas or agricultural domains. In this context,I think that the use of mobile phones help the of agriculture in the urban areas too.So,exclusion of urban area from the conference agenda may be a partial exercise.I propse the organizers to consider my point sympathetically. Best Regards, Zainul[/color]

Charles, can you tell us more about the [url=http://www.tradenet.biz]TradeNet[/url] service? Do you have a direct experience using it? How does it work? Is the dissemination of data so useful for people to decide where to go to sell their products?

Helene, I really think that Labs are fundamental to sustain the future development of mobile telephony. Are you thinking about distributing your applications using commercial platforms like the [url=http://www.apple.com/iphone/appstore/]Apple store[/url] on iTunes, the [url=http://www.android.com/market/]android market[/url] or the future symbian store?

Jimmy, You mentioned the use of 3G phones for getting expert advice. Are the users and experts limited by the amount of text related data that can be effectively transmitted over a phone? By that I mean, you can take a picture of a pest and get it identified easily by phone. The recommendations for control measures may be a several page publication, however. Any experience with that? Mark

Jimmy, You mention use of 3G data speed to send information to experts for diagnosis and advice. That seems to be a good approach for diagnosis of a pest, for example, but then the follow-up on recommendations for pest control may be several pages long. Any experience with that and how the follow-up goes when longer textual information is required? Thanks Mark

This is a question for Mr. Jawahar Kanjilal of Nokia. Thank you for participating in this forum. I am a student in international business and economic development at The Fletcher School, Tufts University. I am very curious about the Nokia Life Tools applications that you are piloting in India. I believe this is the first attempt by a hardware manufacturer to package applications targeted to low-income rural users and the potential is extremely exciting. I would love to hear more specifically about how the services are accessed (SIM toolkit, Java app requiring data connection?) and what the cost are to the end user besides the initial hardware purchase. Also, how do you see this service expanding? It seems like many exciting content partnerships could be integrated, both for market pricing and for education.

Hello, I teach at one of our public universities in Uganda, but I am also an active livestock farmer and a vet. In my home village and environs, the subsistence farmers have used the mobile telephone mainly to call in the vet in case of an emergency, including requests for Artificial Breeding (AI) services if available, and for routine veterinary visits. This has made provision of veterinary services much more efficient than before the mobile phone came on stage (before the mobile phone era, the farmer would have to physically reach the vet's office/home to report a case, or request for any other service, a process resulting in delay of getting the necessary services!!). By calling the vet while he is in the field, for example, allows the vet to make immediate changes in his previous programme, by attending to a new case in the same village as the one he had planned to visit before the call, thus preventing the vet from making a trip to the same area two times (or more), thus saving resources (in terms of fuel, for example), and the sick animal getting quick attention, among other advantages. In addition, some times it possible to provide professional advice to the farmer via the mobile phone, hence saving a lot of time and probably resources.

Contrary to what we theorize the evidence of farmers actually using mobile phone based applications in agriculture is still not there in any significant way. Yes, there are many good projects [lots of pilots] but there aren't so many large sustainable programs. I grant that with increasing levels of affordable access it will change and become possible to walk the talk. We, at LIRNEasia recently looked at the information search [transaction] costs of a selected group of small holder vegetable farmers in Sri Lanka from the point of deciding to grow to selling at the wholesale market and found it was as high as 11% of the total production cost. Some of these findings are at http://lirneasia.net/projects/2006-07/icts-transaction-costs-traceability/ We also found that the use of mobile phones for obtaining necessary agriculture related information among this group was very low, thus creating a significant opportunity to create mobile-phone based e-agriculture applications. If we are to succeed, we must not try to replicate the e-agriculture services we attempted to provide over the kiosks and telecentres [unsuccessful for the most part] over mobile phones. Farmers do need information, and that information is usually available, but if the manner in which it is disseminated is complicated, the farmers won't bother to obtain that information and continue to make decisions without that information or obtain that information the traditional way at a significant cost. So we have to understand what specific information they need, when they need it, how much they are willing to pay for it and so on. Request-driven models, in my view, might better reflect the incentive-cost structure than the case where information gets pushed to the farmer periodically. But then again, the Jensen case does not have any mobile-based application. All that happened was that the fishermen were able to communicate with the traders on shore to determine prices. There were no applications; there were no fancy model, only the opportunity to communicate between the boat and the shore. PS. mike glad you liked the scoping study :wink:

We have been looking at use of mobile telephones in conjunction with rural and community radio for a while now and keeping a log with some ideas and examples at [url]http://comunica.org/radio2.0/[/url] One of the more interesting posts is about the use of SMS by rural and community radio stations. At first glance SMS text messages would seem like a natural for inclusion in a community radio station's essential toolkit. SMS messages are inexpensive and easy-to-use and in recent years the mobile phones that are needed for sending and receiving them have become ubiquitous. However, a survey of recent projects indicates that use of SMS messages among community media in the developing world is still at an early stage. In most stations SMS use is informal. The few cases identified of community stations making more complex use of SMS messages have accompanied political crises or natural disasters and have inevitably been donor financed. There are few, if any, experiences of complex uses of SMS by community media without external funding and technical support, even though the financial and technical resources required are minimal. More at [url]http://comunica.org/radio2.0/archives/87[/url] In the next few weeks a research project that AMARC and ALER are cooperating on will be starting two "laboratories" at rural stations in Venezuela and Argentina. In Venezuela the emphasis will be on use of the internet, but the Argentinian project will focus on innovative mobile telephone use by the rural radio station and the community to encourage community participation, experiment with new ways of information dissemination and to improve internal organisation of the station itself.