Question 3 (opens 2 Dec.) What is necessary to ensure ensuring that rural youth, women, the poorest...

Michael,

it is very good to copy relevant previous discussion!
your experience in Uganda is relatively similar to mine in Mali with few differences & specificities.

*Engagement
As it happens in many domains, people are more enclin to engage with a particular service (mobile service or radio program) if they can associate themselves with wha tis presented. Integrating women voices or contribution to the program is a successfull way in that regards. Using e.g. a female voice in IVR is also a way to leverage this identification. As a side note, that was one of our finding when testing voices in IVR system: some topics are normally covered by men or women, and therefore a same gender must apply when providing information through  IVR.

*Access to devices
In our experience, and this was largely underlined in a few posts, the access to mobile devices is harder for women or poorest fraction of the farmes. Mixing radio programs and mobile is a way to bridge this gap, instead of focusing on mobile only. Carefully selecting the time of the day where people have more likely access to a device is also a way to leverage call-in in radio programs

*technology
We found where we were owrking in Mali that the level of literacy was largely lower within women than men. The use of IVR technology vs SMS was a way to empower women, instead of using SMS intermediaries that in our case could only be men

steph

Thanks for the great discussion so far. I very much appreciate the insights of Stephen, Lee and others on the issue of designing ICT interventions that take into account the particular challenges that women in developing countries face. Ideas like using women's voices for IVR messages are very relevant and actionable. 

I would like to suggest, though, that in the same way that not all poor people are the same, women also cannot be thought of as a single, uniform group when we are talking about designing ICT interventions. The mistake that many people make when it comes to product design, not just in our field, is to assume a far greater degree of homogeneity of preferences, behavior, etc. than actually exists. As we can intuit, not only can we not assume homogeneous preferences among all women, but we cannot really generalize about women in India alone, for example, or even rural women in India. The tendency to generalize often leads to poor design and ultimately product failure.

For this reason, Grameen Foundation has invested tremendously in developing a human-centered design (HCD) approach to product and service design. Rather than using deductive or inductive reasoning, this approach relies heavily on observation and repeated iterations of hypotheses based on those observations. In this way, we don't fall into the trap of desiging for the lowest common denominator, which is usually a race to the bottom. 

Observing women's behavior, and not just listening to what the women tell us, will ultimately guide us to more effective ICT solutions for them.

Today, the 3rd December, is the International Day of Persons with Disabilities (http://www.un.org/disabilities/default.asp?id=1607) with the theme “Break Barriers, Open Doors: for an inclusive society and development for all”

Coming back to the forum question, we see that in most countries, especially in rural areas, patriarchal society is prevelant. While the point flagged by David, eariler and also in Q2, on the lack of capacity by  the actors to identify and integrate gender in all stages of work is very true, we see that a lot of changes have been seen in the last few years with regard to gender and designing inclusive ICTs.

The year 2014 is designated as the International Year of Family Farming by the United Nations and during one of our recent regional dialogues on a question on 'How to make family farming more "attractive" so as to retrain/attact youth' it was mentioned that the introduction of emerging ICTs for agricultural development could be one of the key 'attractions' to brining in youth back to farming.

Hence designing appropriate ICTs ensuring equitable access to all is of paramount importance. This involves  both policy interventions and product design.

Trying to bring in gender equality & equity has to be carefully handled and very strategically introduced into program as this may go against centuries old deep-seated cultural traditions, ideologies and societal systems.

Key to ensuring that tha the advantages and opportunitites offered by ICTs are exploited fully by all is awareness creation. there needs to be a succinct plan right from the beggining on how to maximize use of whichever ICT application or innovation by all, which should include spreading the word about the same.
Women, rural youth and all indeginous people will only benefit from ICTs if they know a)about ICTs and what opporuntities they provide and b) hwo to use them.
From my expeirnece in a recent study that I carried out looking at the uptake of ICT-based innovations for information access in Kenya, lack of information about these is a major hinderance in their adoption.
We need to focus not just on coming up with ICT based applications and how to use thme for imporved productivity, but equally on maximizing their use by promoting them and spreading their 'gospel'.

Enabling global collaborative farming by linking real farms in rural areas with millions of online investors.

Now, removing the obstacles that small holder farmers face is the most crucial effective tool. Most Rural people have little or no formal education, they do not know what institution is available to assist them like UN-FAO and other development Agencies. They cannot go to local Agriculture Extension offices and financial institution to seek for advice or capital to start/improve their farms. The irrational fear of institutions/organisations that are set up to assist them (for example, Minisries of Agriculture, District Agriculture Offices etc.) is happening.

Due to the above reason which basically comes down to funds and technical know how, Agriculture in poor/rural areas has become a career for eople without school knowledge. It is therefore unattractive to youth with little or higher education. Ladies even frowned on marrying those who have chosen Agriculture as career.

I am saying this because I grew up in a typical village setting from central Region of Ghana, have little education and have decided to tackle this in my own small way (www.farmable.me)

The solutions are many but can be tackled one at a time. some of these include;

1. Rebranding farming and presenting it to the youth nicely through Social Media, Websites, and SMS.
2. Making capital easy and accessible for those interested in Agriculture and related businesses.
3. Creating platforms that connect Agriculture to investors in small monetary amounts with returns on investoment. Once food becomes abundant it will cheap and hunger and peoverty will be a story of the past.

There is abundant Agriculture Land in Africa where these poor/rural people leave, all they need is a career that they feel respected doing, easy access to capital and technical know.

NOTE: In doing this, We should not forget to deal with them in business terms, where the Agribusiness environment created is a collaborative one, which invloves buying and selling with them as partners, which will subsequently lead to revenues and pofit generation.

Many Thanks,
Kamal Yakub
Ghana
[email protected]

Mr. Kamal, I'm having trouble accessing/locating any project information on your website.  Do you know if viewing is limited in some countries?  Thanks.

We are still developing the website. if what you see is the big cow with pictures of social investors and the sign up page then its right. We are hoping to go live before new year.

You can sign up to be among the first people to receive updates from us.

Many thanks,
Kamal.

Hi Mr Kamal
I would like to  congratulate you about the important ideas you have express in your post.
My first impression was that your perspective was idealist, but once i get into your web i was impressed about what you and your colleagues have been able to do, "rebranding farming and presenting it to the youth nicely through Social Media, Websites, and SMS" and i understand how important is your key question: Enabling global collaborative farming by linking real farms in rural areas with millions of online investors.

This is the first time during this post that i see clearly how could it be the financial problems that small farmers have in poor areas in the world be solved in the future at a great scale.

Your idea about how to use crowfunding to invest in a cow, get benefits and help farmers to develop a career that they feel respected and profitable for them could be easily a trending topic in social media and could promote farming in the area you well know where you have designed to start your project. I think is very important that your idea has an ethic strength perspective in values to be prepared to grow with succed: every good or bad news in media goes very fast.

I have some questions about this:

• Is your strategy to grow in other agriculture areas like annual crops or tree plantations? It is not so easy to control prices and the value chain if we don´t solve marketing intermediates
• Do you want to collaborate with fundations or similar with experience in field to solve farmers problems, like gender problems that are been talking in this post or similar?
• What is your approach to use new technologies to help this growers to be more efficient?
• Doyou think that your approach could help the empowerment of training farmers and technical staff that are necessary to develop your ideas?

Thanks a lot for your efforts.

Is your strategy to grow in other agriculture areas like annual crops or tree plantations? It is not so easy to control prices and the value chain if we don´t solve marketing intermediates

If I get your question well, you seek to know if I have a strategy for growing annual crops and tree plantations in agricultural areas... and that it may be impossible to control prices.

My contention is that the challenge of market intermediaries is the creation of agribusiness enterprises. Aggregation of outputs of any value chain layer helps address market intermediary challenge.

Do you want to collaborate with foundations or similar with experience in field to solve farmers problems, like gender problems that are been talking in this post or similar?

Foundations are necessary to support investment and creation of sustainable agribusinesses since cost of money is very high. Sustainable programmes call for term investors or angel investors whose desire is to create something that thrives sustainably.

What is your approach to use new technologies to help these growers to be more efficient?

Efficiency of smallholders comes from knowledge and its dissemination. The technologies best suited for this include FM Radio, the internet, mobile phones and of course our own technology on digital weighing and linkage to database solutions that drive ERPs.

Do you think that your approach could help the empowerment of training farmers and technical staff that are necessary to develop your ideas?

I am currently involved in a knowledge management perspective in the CAADP's programme on the Agricultural Training and Vocational Education and Training. Part of this effort is to promote agricultural staff training. Using the online learning programmes promoted by the Telecentre.org Academy, much of the training can be undertaken through hosted online databases. All our programmes are driven through training supported empowerment with Cisco and Telecentre learning programmes that engage both youth and women.

Kiringai

Hello Alvarez,

Thanks so much for taking the time to go through our website. That shows how interested you are in the fight against poverty and extreme hunger.

This platform will not allow me to answer your questions in detail but I will try.

1. Farmable is formed from two words- 'Farm' and 'able', which means abilty to farm. We are starting with cattle to create a robust module and then apply it to other areas of farming/agriculture. It is easy to apply the model to annual crops and tree plantations and it in our Business Plan. I agree about price control in the fragmented value chain. Here Farmable has devided it's business operations into three namely; Farmable Online Business Unit(FOBU), Social Enterprice Unit(SEU) and Ghana Beef Company Ltd.
2. The SEU involves field operations with strategic partners including Development Agencies, NGOs and Universities, that will work together to improve the capacity of Smallholder cattle farmers and the health of their herds. There are more women in rural areas than men due to so many factors and so our focus in the partnership with small holder farmers will be on rural women.
3. We are creating partnership with small holder farmers and list their farms on our online platform, showcase progress of their farming activities through videos and SMS to online investors. We will have access to their farms through our farm management tool.
4. Our approach is simple partnership. Once our small holder partner farmers know that they are part of the system, our training and capacity buiding will become a routine business process in their daily lives. What is happening now is that NGOs, Develepment Agencies ang Government extension officers organise training for small holder farmers and the leave them to their faith. Farmable will change this. what they need is an enabling Agri-business environment to play in and that is what Farmable model is based on. We will raise funds for them through our FOBU, Partner with them and build their capacity through SEU and market the products through Ghana Beef Company Ltd.

I would be glad to share with you or any interested party on the whole process of Farmable.me

Many thanks,
Kamal Yakub.
[email protected]