Using mobiles for rural literacy and market information in Niger: Projet ABC / IMAC

Posted by admin on Dec 03, 2009

This guest post was written by Joshua Haynes who is studying for his Masters of International Business, at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Reposted with Hayes' permission.


Projet Alphabétisation de Base par Cellulaire (ABC), conceived of and spearheaded by Tufts University professor Jenny Aker, uses mobiles phones as tools to aid in adult literacy acquisition in rural Niger. 

Adult literacy in rural areas faces an inherent problem.  In Niger, for example, there are no novels, newspapers, or journals in native languages like Hausa or Zarma.  The 20% of Nigériens who are literate are literate in French.  The vast majority of rural villagers have struggled to maintain their livelihoods since time immemorial without ever knowing how to read a single word. What’s the point of literacy if there is no need for written materials?

Mamadou Issoufou, like 80% of people who live in rural areas, has access to a couple of different weekly markets where he can buy and sell his millet. One market, Dogon Kirya, is 11 kilometers away and the other, Doubélma, is 15 kilometers away.  As Dogon Kirya is closer, he usually travels there, but he knows that sometimes he can get a better price when he goes to Doubélma.  If a fellow villager who traveled to Doubélma the previous week indicates that prices were better there than in Dogon Kirya, then Mamadou might decide to go the extra four kilometers, but he’s not sure he’ll get the same prices this week, too. He leaves it up to chance.

On Wednesdays, the Service d’Information sur les Marchés Agricoles (SIMA) sends radio broadcasts on the prices of the most important staples like millet and sorghum for the largest markets in the country.  Unfortunately, Mamadou, like most rural farmers, doesn’t have access to the broadcast, and if he did, his two main markets aren’t large enough to be covered by SIMA.  Even if they were large enough, Dogon Kirya’s market is held on Tuesdays, so any information from the radio would be six days old.

If Mamadou had access to some sort of real-time, demand-driven information, he could make better choices on where to buy and sell his goods.  The mobile phone is a perfect device for transmitting information, but even though Mamadou may have access to a phone, he can’t read. The point of literacy in rural areas is increase access to information.

This past summer, between my first and second year as a graduate student at The Fletcher School at Tufts University, I was fortunate to work with Jenny and the amazing teams at CRS and SIMA, inclduing Djibou Alzouma, Aïchatou Bety, Sadou Djibrilla, Scott Isbrandt and Ousseïni Sountalma. We developed a system called IMAC – Information sur les Marchés Agricoles par Cellulaire.  IMAC, pronounce ‘ee-mak’, that allows users to query for farmgate and market prices of agriculture products in a number of markets in four languages.   It is built to work as one of the Projet ABC components, but can be used in areas with higher literacy levels. Both Projet ABC and IMAC are funded by Catholic Relief Services (CRS), UC Davis, Oxford University and Tufts University and are housed at and managed by CRS/Niger.

In addition to the querying functionality, we added the ability for SIMA-trained CRS agents to update the crop prices by sending IMAC a specially formatted SMS.  The prices are quickly checked for errors in Niamey, the capital, and then are live for all to use.  Before, it could take up to three weeks for market prices to get recorded, go through a number of different administrative stages and finally end up in the database in the capital, but now it takes a matter of seconds before the data can be accessed.

Although the data is stored and updated in the database, FrontlineSMS, as free SMS tool, is the primary access point which captures the message, sends it to the database for processing, waits for the response, and then sends the response to the waiting villager.  By exploiting FrontlineSMS’ HTMLRequest functionality, we were able to access a backend system and turn FrontlineSMS into a demand-driven automatic information dissemination tool.

I returned to Niger last month to not only see how well the system was still working – a big relief for developers - but to be surprised by the number of new markets and products that had been added to the system.  These additional markets will allow even more villagers, once at least semi-literate, to obtain information that will better help them make more informed decisions about their economic resources.

Using mobiles for rural literacy and market information in Niger: Projet ABC / IMAC data sheet 5151 Views
Countries: Niger

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