Experience Sharing on ICT4Ag

28 June until 1 July 2016. Wageningen, the Netherlands.This CTA workshop was to help document the experiences across the seven activities for cross-border and cross-sectoral learning and exchange across ACP countries.

Five grants were awarded following a call in 2015 and the activities have been implemented between August 2015 and October 2015 in Antigua, Belize, Barbuda, Trinidad and Tobago, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Mali, and Sudan.

The granted organisations were:

• eLEAF Competence Centre, a Netherlands-based high-tech company that uses reliable, quantitative data on water and vegetation coverage to support sustainable water use, increase food production and provide environmental protection systems, will be scaling up its satellite-based information services at the Gezira Irrigation Dam in Sudan to provide targeted delivery of extension services to farmers. Read more.
• RONGEAD, a France-based international network system made up of NGOs, technical specialists, international institutions and businesses that provides market information services, will use the grant to improve its current initiative and scale it up through market analysis, training and capacity building, provision of information and advice and delivery of a business intelligence service to improve the competitiveness, profitability and ability of smallholder farmers to manage business risks in food chains in West Africa. Learn more.
• Syecomp Business Services, a private-sector provider of geographic information system (GIS) services based in Ghana, will use its grant to develop a proof of concept and explore business models for the adoption of geospatial technology (GIS/global positioning system applications), dissemination of agro climatic information and mFarm actor-chain interactions in Ghana.Read more.
• The University of West Indies, a public-sector research institute located in Trinidad and Tobago, will use its grant to extend and scale up an existing suite of web and mobile applications (mFisheries) for small-scale fisheries. It will also explore a novel co-management delivery model for ICTs amongst various agents in the small scale fisheries ecosystem in the Caribbean. Read more.
• Yam Pukri, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) based in Burkina Faso, will use the grant to improve the monitoring and implementation of agricultural policies using ICTs, thereby empowering smallholder farmers to contribute to the agricultural and rural development policy processes. Read more.

In 2015, CTA followed up with a second activity that targets mobile applications in specific as a result of the ubiquitous nature of the mobile technology in almost every household, particularly in developing regions, such as Africa. Two mobile applications were chosen for this proof-of-concept activity:

• Farmerline Ltd. Farmerline has a mobile-web based application that communicates timely and relevant agricultural information (such as weather alerts, best farm practices, financial tips, market prices and market access) to farmers. Its challenge lies in ensuring mobile app users are fully capable of using and benefiting from the functions of the app. Read more.
• Ensibuuko. It is an early start-up technology enterprise that facilitates development solutions geared to increasing access to finance and information services to smallholder farmers. With its core banking and information platform, “Mobile Banking Information Systems” (MOBIS), Ensibuuko seeks to increase access and efficiency to financial services and information to both the rural financial institutions and farmers. Ensibuuko won the first ‘Hackathon’ organised by CTA during the ICT4Ag Conference 2013. Their main goal for the Apps4AgLO was to build capacity of target users to ensure successful adoption and use of MOBIS platform to improve agricultural productivity. Read more.