MobileActive.org

The most widespread information and communication technology (ICT) in developing countries today is the mobile phone. The majority of people in the least developed countries still live in rural areas and their livelihood depends on the primary industries. This study investigates the use of mobile phones among farmers in rural Tanzania in order to supply empirical data on the developmental role of this technology. The results show that the improved access to communication and information that mobile phones represent affects the entire cyclic farming life during the year and has resulted in considerable changes in the entire livelihood constructs, increased opportunities and reduced risks for rural farmer.

From June to September 2011, Agro-Insight conducted a scoping study for SDC, GFRAS and SAI Platform on the production, dissemination and use of farmer training videos in developing countries, with a focus on sustainable agriculture. Literature was consulted, the internet screened, experts and users consulted and a global on-line survey launched in English, French and Spanish.

There is a general consensus that farmers need good agricultural training videos, but they do not browse the web in search of them. For watching videos they rely mainly on outside agencies. Only about 20% of all respondents have never used video to train farmers and have never searched the web for agricultural videos. Many of those didn’t know where to look for videos, hadn’t found videos on the right subject or hadn’t found videos in their local language.

Mobile is one of the technologies discussed, but not the only. The study cites some mobile-based programs and notes current limitations to mobile video for farmers.

This report tackles ICT4D under three key headings: information, communication and participation. While not ignoring negatives, the report primarily explores, through the lens of Cambridge activities in ICT4D, the positive impacts and ongoing challenges of ICT4D: its ability to provide access to valuable information, to create meaningful two-way dialogues, to reach remote and excluded communities, and to empower the excluded to participate in their own development and societies.

There are still significant barriers preventing people in the Global South from accessing ICTs. But with the ongoing, rapid growth in mobile phone use and network connectivity across the world, the parameters are changing. We need to keep adapting to this environment in order to succeed. We must also ensure that the poorest and most disadvantaged are not left behind.

We have also seen challenges and progress that still need to be made in harnessing ICTs to achieve positive and lasting development outcomes. Technology can only ever be one ingredient in this process, but it can be a potent one. A key strength of ICT4D lies in the potential for participation, especially as technologies become more and more interactive.

This report focuses on the opportunity to improve agricultural productivity using mobile services, highlighting the opportunity to bring new investment to a key group: smallholder farmers. Mobile telephony could have significant potential to help the poorest farmers towards greater food and income security.

Only in recent years that mobile communications technology has been widely accepted as an enabler of sustainable growth. In developing markets, where the deployment of mobile telecommunications networks has surpassed traditional fixed-line technology, the mobile telecoms industry is well-placed as an enabler of higher performance in the value chain. There is a distinct need for market-led opportunities, and the opportunity for mobile operators to deliver these is significant.

The mobile services studied here enable companies to access and interact directly with different participants in the value chain, helping to build visibility of issues, capacity and quality. They will support company sustainability objectives, and in particular, progress towards the UN Millennium Development Goals by helping to reduce poverty, improve health and increase funding for education.

This report aims to stimulate the necessary engagement between mobile operators, governments, NGOs and businesses to realize these opportunities and explore others.

This document presents the conclusions of the study “Leveraging ICT for the BoP” sponsored by AFD-Proparco, Ericsson, ICCO, France Telecom-Orange, and TNO and conducted by Hystra and Ashoka from October 2010 to June 2011.

This study aimed to learn from “what works” in terms of full projects (as opposed to technologies) combining both an economically viable model and socio-economic impacts on their end-users, in the field of ICT for development (ICT4D). This work is thus based on the screening of existing projects led by various types of actors (social entrepreneurs, NGOs, private companies…), in 4 sectors of “development” where ICT has already shown it could play a key role: healthcare, education, agriculture, and financial services. 15 of the most ground breaking market-based business models, with a proven scale and results on the ground showing that ICT can be a lever improving the living standards of the BoP, are analysed in depth in the report to support the main conclusions.

Agriculture can serve as an important engine for economic growth in developing countries, yet yields in low-income countries have lagged far behind those in developed countries for decades. One potential mechanism for increasing yields is the use of improved agricultural technologies, such as fertilizers, seeds and cropping techniques. Public-sector programs have attempted to overcome information- related barriers to technological adoption by providing agricultural extension services.

While such programs have been widely criticized for their limited scale, sustainability and impact, the rapid spread of mobile phone coverage in developing countries provides a unique opportunity to facilitate technological adoption via information and communication technology (ICT)-based extension programs.

This article outlines the potential mechanisms through which ICT could facilitate agricultural adoption and the provision of extension services in developing countries. It then reviews existing programs using ICT for agriculture, categorized by the mechanism (voice, text, internet and mobile money transfers) and the type of services provided. Finally, we identify potential constraints to such programs in terms of design and implementation, and concludes with some recommendations for implementing field-based research on the impact of these programs on farmers’ knowledge, technological adoption and welfare.

At the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000, world leaders adopted the Millennium Declaration, committing nations to a new global partnership to reduce extreme poverty and address pressing challenges of hunger, gender inequality, illiteracy, and disease. The year 2015 has been affirmed as the deadline for reaching these Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets.

The goal is to show how an integrated approach to community-level development can translate the international MDG agreements into ground-level breakthroughs throughout rural sub-Saharan Africa. Villages are located in deeply impoverished rural areas that were considered hunger hotspots—with at least 20% of children malnourished. Sites were selected to reflect a diversity of agro-ecological zones, representing a range of challenges to income, food production, disease ecology, infrastructure, and health system development.

The Millennium Villages Project is a ten-year initiative spanning two five-year phases. The first phase focuses on achieving quick wins, especially in staple crop production and disease control, and on establishing basic systems for integrated rural development that help communities escape the poverty trap and achieve the MDGs. The Project involves the coordinated community-led delivery of a locally tailored package of scientifically proven interventions for agriculture, education, health, and infrastructure. Over the first five-year phase, interventions are delivered at a modest cost, totaling approximately $120 per capita per year, of which MVP brings about half to complement funds from the host government, the local community, and other partners. The second five-year phase will focus more intensively on commercializing the gains in agriculture and continuing to improve local service delivery systems in a manner that best supports local scale-up.

If communications and high-tech companies are to achieve their growth targets over the next few years, they must look to the emerging economies. These markets, with large populations, hold great promise. Although many consumers in these areas live in rural areas and rely on more limited means, their disposable income has risen in recent years. Many such consumers have become more confident about the future, and are now willing to buy aspirational products such as mobile phones and services, even on credit.

To achieve high performance in this environment, companies must understand the key mobile trends as they evolve in developing economies. They must develop a deeper understanding of the mobile value proposition to emergingmarket consumers as well as their distinctive service needs. New distribution networks must be created. Content, products and services need to be tailored to local populations. These challenges will require new models of collaboration to succeed in a more complex ecosystem.

If communications and high-tech companies are to achieve their growth targets over the next few years, they must look to the emerging economies. These markets, with large populations, hold great promise. Although many consumers in these areas live in rural areas and rely on more limited means, their disposable income has risen in recent years. Many such consumers have become more confident about the future, and are now willing to buy aspirational products such as mobile phones and services, even on credit.

To achieve high performance in this environment, companies must understand the key mobile trends as they evolve in developing economies. They must develop a deeper understanding of the mobile value proposition to emerging market consumers as well as their distinctive service needs. New distribution networks must be created. Content, products and services need to be tailored to local populations. These challenges will require new models of collaboration to succeed in a more complex ecosystem.

This report draws on the experiences of projects using mobile phone-based information and communication technologies (ICT) applications in a number of situations, including mobile monitoring and evaluation, m-banking, community development, literacy, anti-corruption, agricultural extension and agricultural value chain information and access.

The report begins with a general overview of the role that mobile phone-based ICT can play in development and commercial projects, focusing on the situations in which mobile phonebased applications are particularly appropriate, on the potential impacts that they can achieve and on their comparative advantages vis-a-vis other forms of mobile ICT.

The report then considers in more detail the experience of the projects in using mobile phone-based ICT, shedding light on such issues as the appropriateness and relevance of the systems used, their replicability and scalability and their sustainability.

Featherweight multimedia devices combine audio with non-electronic visual displays (e.g., paper). Because of their low cost, customizability, durability, storage capacity, and energy efficiency, they are well-suited for education and information dissemination among illiterate and semi-literate people.

We present a taxonomy of featherweight multimedia devices and also derive design recommendations from our experiences deploying featherweight multimedia in the agriculture and health domains in India. We found that with some initial guidance, illiterate users can quickly learn to use and enjoy the device, especially if they are taught by peers.

Populations in the rural developing world have just as many, if not more, information needs as people living in more affluent areas. But their constraints — intermittent power, intermittent connectivity, limited education, literacy and capital — make first-world approaches to accessing information systems inapplicable. Mobile phones are on the cusp of spurring an information revolution in such regions. Long battery life, wireless connectivity, solid-state memory, low price and immediate utility make this device better suited to rural conditions than a PC. However, current software on mobile phones makes them hard to use and to program.

In this dissertation, I present the design, implementation and evaluation of CAM — a mobile application framework designed to address the information needs of the rural developing world. Beginning with a two-month participatory design study, including users with varying levels of education, I propose some general guidelines for user interface and system design in this context. Motivated by these guidelines, I present CAM. CAM applications are accessed by capturing barcodes on paper forms using the mobile phone camera, or entering numeric strings with the keypad. Supporting one-step navigation, direct linkage to paper practices and offline multi-media interaction, CAM is uniquely adapted to rural device, user and infrastructure constraints. To demonstrate the usability of this framework, I implement and evaluate several distinct CAM-based applications (one of which has already been commercially deployed). I also provide preliminary motivation for fourteen other applications that could be implemented with the same, or similar, approach.

The paper describes a collection of initiatives delivering support via mobile phones to small enterprises, small farms, and the self-employed. Using a review of 26 examples of such services currently operational in Africa, the analysis identifies five functions of mobile livelihood services: Mediated Agricultural Extension, Market Information, Virtual Marketplaces, Financial Services, and Direct Livelihood Support. It discusses the current reliance of such systems on the SMS channel, and considers their role in supporting vs. transforming existing market structures.

This paper examines the proposed framework for evaluating the impact of the intervention of mobile-based services on socio-economic development of Indian rural areas. Framework suitability has been studied using case study method with pilot test data. Existing literature shows multiple ways of studying mobile impact through different frameworks. The need for uniform framework is the felt need as various user-centric mobile services launched across rural markets. India becomes a field testing ground for most of the multinational firms who want to test their innovative business models. This framework provides a testing method for socioeconomic development impact on rural areas. This study adopted socio economic criteria (SEC) used by Indian marketers as basis for sample selection. The pilot study clearly shown that field is ready to test the proposed framework.

Research carried out by International Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER). The ICRIER researchers looked at three segments of the population – the agriculture sector, the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) sector and urban slum dwellers. The research demonstrates that access to telecommunications is an important catalyst to realizing productivity and efficiency improvements and thereby making it possible for the benefits of economic growth. The research in this report on the uses and impacts of mobiles in agriculture show that improving productivity and rural incomes requires an array of enablers in the production cycle, which runs from planting to the final sale of produce; access to information is an important enabler.

The lack of adequate infrastructure is particularly acute in rural areas, home to 70% of India’s population and the 52% of the work force that is primarily engaged in agriculture and related activities. Agriculture in India accounts for 18% of national income, implying extremely low agricultural productivity. Until now, the focus of mobile operators’ attention has been on the more lucrative urban markets. The high cost of infrastructure rollout in less dense rural areas and affordability barriers for the rural population are likely reasons. But there are signs that this is changing. Infrastructure rollout in rural areas is now eligible for subsidy and all major providers have reported future plans for expansion in rural India.

Small farmers often struggle to access high-quality inputs such as advanced seed varieties, or services such as soil testing or credit, fertilizers, availability of loan options and efficient distribution networks and weather forecast. Therefore a very uneven access to information is seen currently. A national survey of farmers found that only 40% of farmer households accessed information about modern agricultural techniques and inputs while a lot of them still depend on other progressive farmers.