By Abdul-Kudus Fuseini, Tamale
People worldwide are rethinking how food is grown, processed and distributed. World leaders and Civil Society Organisations are also making moves toward increased food production and food security through agriculture technology, especially in the agriculture value chain.
Agricultural value chain actors in Ghana are dispersed over space and are poorly linked to each other. The growing use of the World Wide Web and cell phone-based SMS services provide the opportunity for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) solutions to link these actors.
In doing this, there is need to link, identify and adopt appropriate technologies for farmers -- particularly those with proven potential to enhance productivity, incomes and food security. In doing so, agriculture in the country can become more productive and thereby contribute to increasing growth in the economy, improved food security and reduced poverty.
In Ghana, Mfarms is leading the way in the adoption of farming technologies for increased food production. The Mfarms platform is a web and cell-phone based technological platform that provides affordable tools for building linkages, improving communications and operational efficiencies among actors along the agricultural value chain.
The Mfarms platform assists the International Fertiliser Development Centre (IFDC) implement the “Farmers to Markets (FtM)†project funded by the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).
The platform has a high potential for making agriculture and agribusiness a lucrative venture and is designed to create operational efficiencies by allowing organisations, associations and identifiable groups to serve a large number of farmers or affiliates dispersed over space.
The mFarms platform provides an important marketplace for various agricultural value chain actors to connect with each other, allowing them to exchange information among themselves for the purpose of planning.
It brings actors together to discover agribusiness opportunities, learn best practices and link smallholders to markets. Actors are able to interact among themselves through the use of cell-phone technologies, SMS and interactive voice response services (IVRs).
Agricultural value chain actors in Ghana are often times poorly linked to each other. This makes it difficult for the small holder farmer to access information on the inputs and output markets in a timely manner, to take advantage of the most appropriate and lucrative opportunities. It also poses a challenge to the aggregator, marketer, processor and the industrial buyer regarding where to locate these farmers in order to gather produce from the farm-gate to its final destination.
With the emergence of a large number of part-time farmers and an increasing number of absentee farmers, Mfarms has built in extension monitoring tool that allows absentee farmers, aggregators monitor the activities of their farm mangers and extension agents.
The application allows agents/farm managers take pictures of every activity as well as the GPS coordinates and farm managers, and send to the platform on real-time basis. Activities can also be scheduled for the agents or farm managers to implement while you monitor progress of work wherever you are in the world via the world-wide-web.
According to the 2011 Mobile Africa Report, published by Internet organisation Mobile Monday, Ghana has a mobile phone penetration of 80.5%.
This provides a level of hope that agricultural interventions using mobile phones provides a viable option for bringing the various actors in the value chain together, and when targetted well has the potential to succeed.
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