Saturday, April 30, 2016

Making sense of drone regulations - Available on the latest issue of ICT Update


Drones for insuring Indian farmers more effectively - Available on the latest issue of ICT Update


Friday, March 4, 2016

IWD2016 - From GPS to drones – women leading the way

Tanzanian entrepreneur Rose Funja believes that information and communication technologies (ICTs) hold the key to a better future for young women, especially in the agriculture sector. Setting an example to them all, she has launched a start-up that links small-scale farmers to financial institutions – and is now turning her thoughts to drones.

An ICT start-up that grew out of a CTA hackathon contest is poised to help solve one of the most intractable problems facing farmers in Tanzania – how to show banks that they own the land they farm, so that they can secure loans using it as collateral.

Behind AgrInfo, which uses geographical information system technology to map information about farmland and the crops it produces, is dynamic ICT specialist and entrepreneur Rose Funja. The idea came to her and her partner Grace Makanyaga as a solution for tree farmers, but the young women quickly realised there was potential for scaling out the concept to reach other producers. In many parts of Tanzania, land ownership is unrecorded, aside from in village customary documents, making it difficult for farmers to obtain credit.

"We all know that for a smallholder farmer, the farm is their major asset," said Funja. "AgrInfo profiles the farmer and the farming business – the farm, the location, the size, the produce – and posts this data on an online platform, then gives access to this to financial services who use it to assess the creditworthiness of the farmers and give them loans."

The business concept received a major boost when AgrInfo won the runner-up prize in the CTA AgriHack Talent Programme for East Africa in 2013, a contest based on the idea of a hackathon – a gathering that brings together computer programmers for a short period of time to develop an ICT application or platform that addresses a specific challenge.

Refining the business model


In the run-up to the tournament finals, Funja and Makanyaga received technical support to develop their idea, as well as advice on how to draw up a business model, how to approach investors and how to pitch their idea to the judges and the audience. After the hackathon, a follow-up phase offered incubation and mentoring from a local ICT innovation hub, together with smartphones and a cash prize of €4,000, which proved invaluable as a first investment.

"The help of CTA and the training we received took our idea to a whole new set of levels," said Funja. "That's when everything started rolling out, and it's been a roller coaster ever since."

Rose and her new business partner – Makanyaga is no longer closely involved in the start-up – are currently running a marketing campaign to explain the AgrInfo service to farmers, mainly targeting producer organisations. The service works on a subscription basis, with the charge added to producer-organisation membership fees for farmers who decide to sign up.

The cost of the service is deliberately pitched at an affordable price, and Funja predicts that it will pay for itself in terms of better access to credit for farmers, so that they can expand operations.

"We go and collect the GPS coordinates for a farm and check the ownership," she explained. "We couple that with an assessment of what is produced on the farm, as a basis for a credit analysis. We also update the data as time goes on, which will increase a farm's credit worthiness. So if a farm increases from one to five hectares, for example, the bank sees the growth and will be more willing to make a loan."

Future plans involve extending the database model to cover the entire value chain, connecting farmers with farm supplies, extension workers, weather forecasts and a host of other value-added data, including information on markets.

Always on the lookout for new horizons, Funja is currently exploring the idea of offering a drone service to monitor land maintenance, aimed at reducing damage by fires. Firebreaks – cleared pathways between land boundaries of between 1 and 5 metres – can be effective in preventing fire from spreading from one farm to another, but keeping them from becoming overgrown can be a challenge, and each year hundreds of hectares of farmland are burned.

An ICT boot camp for girls


Funja is firmly convinced that ICTs are the way forward for development in Africa, and especially for women. She is co-founder of a network in Tanzania that promotes women's involvement in ICTs. Called She Codes for Change, the organisation recently ran a month-long ICT boot camp for girls aged 14–19, introducing them to technologies such as web applications, video-game design and electronics.

"ICTs can definitely open up new opportunities for women and I think it's important for them to venture into technology at an early age," said Funja, who in 2014 spent six weeks in New York after being selected as young female leader for US President Obama's project, the Young African Leaders Initiative. She is also director of ICT at the University of Bagamoyo, and as a result of her contacts with farmers for AgrInfo she has recently entered the sector herself, cultivating sesame.

"What I would like to see is women becoming more educated in using technology for socio-economic purposes, instead of just social engagement. So rather than seeing mobile phones and the Internet as a way of spending time on social media, I would like them to understand that it can be a very valuable tool to help them improve their livelihoods, for example by enabling them to sell their crops for a better price by accessing information about markets."

Saturday, February 20, 2016

ICTs improving family farming

ICTs are helping millions of smallholder family farmers in developing countries gain better access to information, tools and technology that can transform their livelihoods. Indeed, ICTs help family farmers sell and market their produce, boost their ability to cope with dwindling access to water, land and soil nutrients, and deal with the extreme climate events, pests and diseases that affect their crops. If more of these ICT solutions are tailored to the needs of smallholder family farmers and put within their reach – especially the women farmers who form the bulk of this group – then their agriculture can rapidly move from being a subsistence activity to a successful and sustainable business.

Accessing markets through cooperation


Agriculture is becoming more market oriented globally. Individual family farmers, however, are finding it increasingly difficult to participate in markets – not only in national and international markets, but even in local ones. Smallholder farmers have small amounts of farm produce to market but often do not have access to systems of communication, finance and transport. If they could somehow aggregate their produce and collectively synchronise their production and marketing systems, then they would be able to enter these markets more easily as a collective.  
ICTs can help smallholder farmers improve their production systems so they can fetch better prices, avoid gluts and have the critical mass to grow market-led crops. Conventionally, this is done by cooperatives and farmer organisations, which bring together farmers. These organisations help reduce weaknesses in the value chain. In most developing countries, however, these organisations are weak and often face constraints in planning and monitoring production systems and setting up logistics for an efficient marketing system.  

Some cooperatives have tried to overcome these constraints by even taking control of the land of participating farmers. This approach, however, diminishes the opportunity for family farmers to participate in the decision-making processes that impact their livelihoods, and so ultimately this approach has failed.    

ICTs now provide the potential to overcome these constraints. They can help smallholder family farmers coordinate their planning and monitoring of production and marketing systems by virtually aggregating data, without cooperatives having to take over the land or do the decision making for their farms. Access to credit, financial and insurance services for smallholder family farmers has been a major constraint to improving their farming and incomes. With the increasing availability of mobile phones and the internet, smallholder farmers can now access financial services much more easily.  
ICTs also allow family farmers to see their farm processes from many different viewpoints, and this enables them to make more sound economic and environmental decisions. At the same time, access to ICTs and information increases their technological literacy. A farmers’ organisation that uses ICTs can now support individual farmers by suggesting what crops they should grow, and where, when and how to market them with these ICT-run systems. These systems can also help farmers organise and plan inputs for their farms. Connectivity also gives smallholders easy access to knowledge-based services that help farmers to solve farming problems.  

Precision technology and land rights


Cloud-based data, application services and the wide availability of smartphones and ‘phablets’ have made precision technology – such as mapping systems with high resolution and three-dimensional maps – more widely available to these farmers. Once the privilege of large farms, smallholders can now use these tools too to measure soil moisture and nutrients, for example, or environmental carbon dioxide.  

The sensors used to make these measurements can be linked to GPS systems and incorporated into sensor networks that can help farmers monitor the well-being of their crops at a micro level. The use of drones and digital cameras are enabling farmers to use very low-cost remote sensing to monitor their crops. With close monitoring, farmers can use water and soil nutrients more effectively and sustainably. This, in turn, improves the resilience of their farming system.  

Many smallholder farmers have difficulty securing their rights to land and other resources. Many family farms have tenancy agreements. But they keep poor records of allotment, ownership and tenancy. Cadastral surveys containing maps and records can now be made, managed and publicly accessed more easily at a lower cost using geographical information systems in the public domain. As a result, farmers can obtain the proper records for their farms and use them to get mortgages, bank loans and compensation. When records become available in the public domain, farmers’ rights to land and other resources such as water become more secure.

A new paradigm for farming


Like society in general, ICTs are ushering in a new paradigm for farming and agriculture. The flow and use of information and knowledge in this paradigm resembles that of a network and therefore calls for new forms of collaboration and partnership.  

ICTs have huge potential to provide knowledge-based services to farmers and others earning their livelihoods in activities related to agriculture, such as agri-businesses, agro-industries and financial services. In the near future, these services will be provided largely by micro, small and medium enterprises to farmers in villages and entrepreneurs who operate in local, national and even international markets. Governments and the public sector in most countries are now the major generators, managers and disseminators of organised data and information related to agriculture.  

Governments are also responsible for agricultural development, research, innovation and extension. New forms of collaboration and partnerships are now needed between the public and private sectors to adapt to changing circumstances in the agricultural sector – changes in which governments and the public sector provide data and information, while the private sector provides the knowledge services.  
Much of the data in the future will be generated and shared by communities. For farming and agriculture, this will occur through agricultural communities that contribute to agricultural commodity chains in terms of input, farming, processing, marketing and consumption. Fields and farms, and all the related processes, will generate huge sets of data – ‘big’ data that will need to be processed instantaneously.  

Individual farmers are being given the ability to create and manage sophisticated information and knowledge thanks to low-cost connectivity, massive computing power accessible through cloud computing with shareable tools, applications and intelligently linked content and data. This ‘democratisation’ of science will draw farmers into agricultural research, innovation and development processes. This could transform the entire structure of agricultural research and innovation systems, especially for smallholder family farmers, whose specific needs seem to have been ignored by current technological innovations.  

There are now a large number of ICTs within reach of family farmers that would help them to improve their farming practices. Technological trends indicate that many more innovations are in the making as well. However, their availability is still too widely dispersed. Individual technologies and tools are not integrated yet in ways that would help smallholder family farmers improve their farming practices.  

For example, there are applications that enable farmers to do online banking but which are not linked to farmers’ needs, such as credits through mortgages and crop insurance. To make ICTs even more widely available, institutions, their policies, the governance of information flows and the way they organise their work all need to undergo major transformation.  

This new paradigm calls for new policies, and new regulatory mechanisms and laws. Old institutions need to be revamped; new institutions and organisations need to be established; and government work processes need to be restructured. The main concern of governments should be to provide not only data and information but also the infrastructure and investment that promote new capacities and the integration of information systems and services.

Source: ICTUpdate

Better farming with drones

Technology is part of everyday work life for this farmer and drone enthusiast from north-eastern Germany, who relies heavily on computers, GPS control technology and data networking for running his agricultural enterprise. This short video documents how drone technology can be of immediate use to the farmer in spotting and locating problems on his fields.

Monday, October 5, 2015

Social media revolutionising rural communities in the Pacific - Pacific Beat - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)


Social-media has been called many things -- and now it's being described as a 'life-changing' experience for people living in rural parts of the Pacific.

Increasingly, social media, and the internet in general, is being used to drive agricultural development - with some dramatic impacts.

Speakers: Michael Hailu, director of Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA); Giacomo Rambaldi, Sr Programme Coordinator, ICTs (CTA, Web2forDev) and Faumuina Felolini Tafunai, Media Specialist (WIBDI).

by Catherine Graue
Source: Pacific Beat | Duration: 5min 42sec