Empowering community "coaches" to improve Papua New Guinea's agricultural productivity and marketing

Wewak, Papua New Guinea – In a bid to strengthen community-embedded capacities in digital skills, digital agriculture, and financial inclusion in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, the EU Funded UN Joint STREIT Programme organised an intensive training for Maprik Secondary School's teachers and lead farmers on Digital Skills and Financial Literacy modules. The training was aimed at building trainees' capacities as future Trainers of Trainers (ToTs) or Coaches.

Held in close collaboration with the PNG National Information & Communication Technology Authority (NICTA), this two-day event attracted 30 participants, including three model farmers and female teachers (comprising 40% of total attendees). It was the first of a series of similar trainings envisaged by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF), as part of the EU-STREIT PNG Programme, for stakeholders in East Sepik Province using resource centre as a conduit.

"This training enhanced the capacity of local farmers and MSMEs on relevant ICT applications and financial services to improve teachers and lead farmers' understanding and use of communication tools, including messenger services and social media applications. The training also increased understanding and appreciation of the enabling role of digital technologies, the gaps and barriers that constrain farmers and MSMEs from using ICTs in their agri-businesses and means to overcome the barriers using relevant and available tools, processes, and systems" said Kanagat Alyshbaev, the ITU Project Officer.

This learning opportunity organised to "improve agriculture productivity, financial management and marketing for cost-effectiveness, efficiency, and sustainability, and to increase literacy and knowledge on financial services and personal financial management," explained Sharad Bangari, the UNCDF Digital & Agri Finance Specialist.

This training covered six modules, including Digital Literacy, Internet and Web 2.0, Social Networking for Development, Social Media for Agri-Business and Marketing, Financial Literacy, Remote Collaboration (Google Services and Dropbox), and Online Virtual Communication.

Deputy Principal of the Maprik Secondary School, Molland Saluali while appreciating the EU-STREIT PNG Programme for supporting school’s resource centre in terms of improving IT skills and sustainability approach, said “these trainings are very useful for us and students and farmers that almost most of the students are coming from rural areas. This will give excellent opportunity that students will go back to villages and share and disseminate the knowledge and experience that they learned. I believe this will be a good start on regular support and this will be a new era of doing business in the agriculture value chain.”

This initiative was well received and embraced by the participants, as many expressed the need for immediate application of some of the common tools, such as social media in teaching, marketing, collaboration, and information access. Participants also expressed that there are far more benefits that could be derived from smartphones, simple technologies, and available services. The training also helped overcome some of the long-held scepticism on their uses and how much value the ICTs can offer in their day-to-day practices in agriculture and finance.

“Two days training gave us a good opportunity to learn and how to use the digital skills, e-agriculture, online marketing tools in our education sector as well as in community. It is a very good to teach people in rural areas how to use digital and social media platforms. It will be useful for me that we will teach students and farmer on what I learned here. I am very interested in continuation of such trainings in future,” added Fredah Vitikut, a Business Management and Economics teacher who attended the training.

East and West Sepik provinces are largely agriculture-based provinces. However, lack of access to credible and timely information is one of the setbacks of agricultural advancement in the region. In this context, ICTs offer enormous opportunities for enhanced agricultural innovation for food security, income, and economic growth. The emerging ICT developments, such as widespread mobile adoption, increasing use of broadband internet, and availability of digital applications will address some of the agriculture challenges in this information age. These include improved access and use of digital financial solutions to support communities for improved financial transactions and savings. Digital agriculture or E-agriculture is strongly perceived under the EU-STREIT PNG framework as a key mechanism for enhanced agriculture production, entrepreneurship, and improved livelihood in the Sepiks.

The EU-STREIT PNG Programme, being implemented as a UN Joint Programme (FAO as the leading agency, and ILO, ITU, UNCDF and UNDP as partners), is the largest grant-funded Programme of the European Union in the country and the Pacific region. The Programme aims to help improve the lives of the people from East and West Sepik provinces by focusing on increasing sustainable and inclusive economic development of rural areas through improved economic returns and opportunities from cocoa, vanilla and fishery value chains while strengthening and improving the efficiency of value chain enablers, including the business environment and supporting sustainable, climate-proof transport and energy infrastructure development.