In late 2012, Mercy Corps’ Agri-Fin Mobile Program commissioned consultants to carry out baseline surveys in order to analyse the potential of ‘bundling’ information services and financial products that can be delivered via mobile phones to assist smallholder farmers increase their incomes in Indonesia, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

The findings from the surveys are intended to support mobile network operators, farmer organisations, financial institutions and others that play active roles in agriculture and mobile money ecosystems to develop sustainable business models.

Overall, the survey findings indicate significant potential for mobile related services in the three countries. For example, more than 80 percent of all surveyed households in Indonesia and Zimbabwe have access to a mobile phone – the only requirement for using mobile phone services. The number was slightly lower in Uganda (65 percent) due to low education levels among farmers and limited network coverage in most rural areas.

Limited uptake of mobile money, as well as limited use of services beyond remittances, appears to be related to an incomplete understanding of the products available.

In relation to the provision of information services to farmers, the research noted that the traditional sources of information – face-to-face and radio are still important sources of contact for most farmers in the three countries. Although there are farmers currently receiving agricultural information through their mobile phones the percentage is a paltry two percent in both Zimbabwe and Uganda. Interviewed farmers however, expressed interest in receiving information through mobile phones.

Regardless of the m-money status of a household, the research noted that remittances are primarily used for routine financial support among relatives living in different households. Evidence from those using mobile money revealed a steady, but gradual, increase in the mobile money subscriber base with 46 percent in Indonesia, 55 percent in Uganda and 64 percent in Zimbabwe of remittances being sent/received mobile money. However, the uptake of services beyond money transfers is somewhat slow, and an average 30 percent of registered users reported knowing about other mobile money applications other than money transfers, sms, and voice services.

The research also noted that rural users travel longer distances (average of 45 kilometers) and spend more money on transportation to reach mobile money agents. Once they get to an agent location farmers in Zimbabwe (where there is liquidity crunch) for example noted that they are more likely to face problems related to agents’ absenteeism, agents experiencing a shortage of cash.

Subsequently Agri-Fin mobile researches will continue to monitor mobile services growth and measure how effectively barriers to new or greater adoption have been overcome.

For more detailed research results please visit: http://bit.ly/agri-finmobile

The terrain has changed so much in just a decade. Currently on average, Africa has about 70% mobile penetration rate. This obviously makes mobile telephony an indispensable component of agricultural development in Africa. Considering that agriculture remains the backbone of the majority of African economies, mobile technology is set to play a major role in agricultural and socio-economic development in the continent.

My experience in development work across Africa spans a couple of years and across several countries. Prior to joining GSMA, I worked for Fairtrade as the Executive Director for Africa covering some 29 countries and supporting market access for over 700,000 smallholders across the continent. While my time at Fairtrade Africa focused on market access and favourable trading terms for the poor, it nevertheless emphasized the significant role that timely and accurate information plays in the overall scheme of development and livelihoods improvement. Many farmers lack access to timely, reliable and relevant information at affordable cost. This is further worsened by the often limited and sometimes inefficient national extension systems in most developing countries. Ultimately, all this continues to contribute to low productivity, low market prices and poor household incomes for thousands of farm families globally. Mobile agricultural programmes will offer the opportunity to leverage the increasing mobile technology penetration in the developing world to improve agricultural productivity, food security and contribute towards livelihoods improvement for those at the bottom of the pyramid.

I am looking forward to an exciting time in GSMA and in employing mobile technology to support agricultural development and livelihoods improvement in developing countries. Will you join us in making a change?

The method we chose to test the farmers’ reaction to Tigo’s mobile information and advisory service was different to a Focused Group Discussion (FDG). In a FGD, a facilitator talks to a group of people (often a group with different ages, gender and socio economic backgrounds), explains the idea to them, and observes their reaction. Often some of the respondents are vocal and overpower the voices of the others who may not understand the product or who have similar difficulties and who may not feel confident enough to express their thoughts. This can sometimes be minimised if the facilitator is experienced enough with asking questions to the less vocal respondents.

For these reasons we chose Usability Testing, where the facilitator’s full attention goes to the single user. Even if the user doesn’t understand the product, there is an opportunity to identify the reason for any confusion and take action accordingly.  Also during the interview the facilitator gets the unique chance to observe every detail of the respondents’ activity related to the usability of the product and collect feedback.

On the first day of our usability testing, we reached the location by noon. Our host had already organised an agriculture extension officer to invite some local farmers according to our sample plan. There was a good mix of gender, age and socio economic background. It was a first-time experience for some of my team members, so everyone was watching the first participant curiously. As more interviews occurred, important findings were identified and the team became more confident.

On the second day of testing, we went to a location about 300 km from Morogoro and met around 10 farmers. This day went smoother than the previous day, and we were done before it was dark.

Some key lessons from our usability testing:

1. Collecting the right people or potential users is a big challenge and often can be the main reason for the failure of the usability test – we were lucky enough to have the right respondents.
2. Morning is the best time of day to run the tests. In remote locations it can get dark all of a sudden because of no electricity and respondents may not feel comfortable to continue – on the first day we had to stretch the last interview with the help of our car’s headlight, which was not ideal.
3. Interview schedules need to be carefully managed. If all respondents come at the same time, it creates extra pressure on the facilitator to move to the next respondents quickly. Additionally, other respondents who are waiting can be upset waiting for a longer time until their interviews.
4. Take dedicated phones to test the product. Using the respondents’ phone can be messy and can turn the interview to a phone fixing session – I hope you understand what I mean!

However, from this trip we have learnt many things especially about the challenges that may come when we do usability testing in similar locations. Now it is time to look at the feedback we received from the users and put this into action. It is critical to accommodate this feedback in the product and we’ll need to go back to run another test to measure the success in near future.

This coming Tuesday 15^th January (13:00 GMT/ 18:30 IST/ 08:00 EST/ 16:00 EAT) we are hosting a webinar with the team behind Nokia Life to go into detail on just how they have deployed their Agriculture Service across four very different countries, each with its own unique challenges and opportunities. [Register for the webinar here]

Nokia Life launched in India in 2009, and was then scaled to Indonesia in late 2009, China in May 2010 and Nigeria in June 2011. It was created to address the information gap and enable consumers in emerging societies to be better informed and improve their livelihoods. There are targeted services for Education, Health, Agriculture, and Infotainment.

Nokia Life Agriculture Services provide farmers with tailored crop tips, agri news, market prices, weather information and advisory. Using SMS as the delivery channel, Nokia Life delivers content to a user’s inbox, providing a rich, smartphone-like experience even on affordable phones.

Join the webinar next Tuesday to interact with Jawahar Kanjilal (Vice President and Global Head of Nokia Life) and Bhanu Potta (Global Product Leader, Learning & Knowledge Services) and hear more about:

• the market, users, needs & challenges
• the service design of the Nokia Life Agriculture service
• the partnership structure including Mobile Network Operators
• the process behind creating relevant and actionable information
• the customer journey

*** Register for the webinar here ***

The GSMA mAgri Programme will be publishing a case study on the Nokia Life Agriculture Service in the coming weeks- stay tuned!

Four new mAgri services developed with the support of the mFarmer initiative

The mAgri team are delighted to be working with four new Agri VAS service providers in Tanzania, Kenya, India and Mali which will benefit over 2 million small-holder farmers. Tigo in Tanzania and HandyGo in India were the first to launch their services and they have already seen demand from several thousands of customers.  Airtel Kenya and Orange Mali will launch in the New Year. These services enable smallholder farmers to access market, weather and agronomy information via SMS, USSD, IVR and call centres. We’ll be sharing more information on these services in the New Year.

Research, learnings, tools & resources available to support the industry

The GSMA team alongside colleagues at ICT for Ag, e-agriculture and many others have developed a host of tools and resources to support mobile and agriculture service providers. Resources include a market entry toolkit, webinar and focus note on how to design and market Agri VAS for women smallholders, tools to support content management, and blogs sharing lessons on market information systems, weather content and user testing.  Links to all these resources are available on our new mAgri website.

We also produced a robust monitoring, learning and evaluation framework that we use to analyse progress and impact across all mFarmer services. The framework is available to any interested parties who are developing their own Agri VAS.

mAgri metrics, products and services went live on the GSMA’s Mobile and Development Intelligence (MDI) portal. In addition to free datasets that can be downloaded and tabulated, the MDI portal features mobile agriculture products and services across the developing world.

Finally, mobile and agriculture hit the conference scene and learnings were shared at the inaugural mAgri panel seminar at Mobile World Congress, the G8 and a number of regional working groups and events.

Research and development of new innovative mobile agriculture services

There was a significant increase in the number of mobile operators, value added service providers, agriculture research and extension agencies, entrepreneurs, NGOs, donor agencies, academics and governments interested in how mobile can be used to advance agriculture development. Partnerships are being formed to utilise the assets that each organisation brings.

A host of new services are being developed that provide information services, value chain linkages and financial services. The Mobile and Development Intelligence (MDI) portal features over 60 mobile agriculture products and services across the developing world. Please get in touch to add your service to the Mobile for Development portal.

We look forward to a productive 2013!

Let’s put it this way: will the farmer follow the advice of planting a new variety of seeds if she doesn’t have money to buy this new variety? Will a farmer living on 1 dollar a day get a new irrigation system to secure the water supply on her farm if there is no lease available for this equipment? For the information to be actionable and actually make a difference, there needs to be a supporting environment available, including access to capital, infrastructure, inputs, services and markets. And although we can’t expect mobile technology to offset the lack of all of those important factors, we can still look at the ways it can enable access to some.

Let’s look at the opportunity for mobile financial services for farmers and possible ways to introduce them to the mobile agriculture services portfolio. A recent report from Dalberg has estimated the global demand for finance from small-holders at $450 billion, with only 2% of that demand currently met – mostly through financial products designed for farmers that are organised in groups (cooperatives and other farming organisations). The report estimates that there are 450 million small-holders globally, with majority of them working in Asia (360 million) and Africa (50 million). Considering that 90% of all small-holder farmers in the world are actually not organised in groups like cooperatives, there couldn’t be a better demonstrated need for financial products designed for individual farmers.

Two suggested pathways to unlocking the financing for agricultural sector are particularly relevant for the mobile sector and providers of mAgri services, as they can be designed and streamlined as mobile agricultural financial services. The first option is to work with existing out-grower schemes, often owned by large multi-nationals that have powerful incentives to secure the supply from farmers. These out-grower schemes could use an existing contract with the farmer as collateral, allowing to distribute risk between the farmer, the bank and the buyer (in this manner Nestle already finances their 32,000 dairy farmers).

The second promising way to enter the market is by financing directly to farmers. Challenging as it might seem from a first glance, direct financing via mobile has some significant upsides – a dramatic decrease in transaction and distribution costs, as well as a large amount of customers that allows banks to diversify the risk. Some obvious challenges for this pathway are: lack of MFI products tailored to agricultural sector with its seasonal cashflows [1], and low financial literacy of the customer base. There is however a great opportunity to analyse the data on mobile money transactions as well as usage of information services to profile the customers according to their associated risk; the latter would only be possible in the partnership between a mobile service provider that is already delivering Agri VAS and a bank.

Both pathways to introduce mobile agricultural financial services would require an existing mobile money platform and a bank, or a consortium of banks, with financial products for the agricultural sector; if agricultural extension information is provided as a supporting tool to the farmer, the risk of this financial service decreases, resulting in a lower interest rate. Financial literacy training could as well become a part of the extension information package.

The win-win outcomes of the game benefit all of the stakeholders in the chain: a farmer gets access to a package of information and financial services, with his SIM-card becoming a tool and a means to entrepreneurial success, meaning that the mobile operator fully benefits from the synergy between Agricultural VAS and mobile money platform. For the bank, agricultural mobile financial services allow to enter a new market segment, while lowering transaction costs without increasing the risks that are mitigated by collateral or careful automated profiling of the customers and supporting information services.

Starting from early 2013, we will be closely monitoring the development in this area of mobile financial services for the agricultural sector, extracting best practices and sharing the insights. Stay tuned!

I visited the headquarters of the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange while I was in Addis Ababa for the recent conference “Making the Connection: Value Chains for Transforming Smallholder Agriculture.” During the conference, I joined a panel to discuss how mobile services, such as those we are supporting under the mFarmer Initiative, are playing a role in strengthening value chains.  One of the main takeaways from the conference was the consensus that working with smallholder farmers can be challenging and in order to increase their participation in the value chain, smallholder farmers need to be organised, with leaders of cooperatives seeing farmers as shareholders of a business. The Ethiopia Commodity Exchange is a great example of this in action.

During my visit to the ECX we watched as buyers and sellers on the trading floor exchanged ‘high fives’ once they’d agreed on a price for the commodity. We were treated to a strong cup of Ethiopia’s finest coffee while we heard from the team behind the idea and the hard work that brought the ECX to what it is today. Below is snapshot of its history and how it works.

The ECX was started 5 years ago with support from the Ethiopian government, as well as donors including USAID, SIDA and the EU. It was set up to help counter some of the challenges faced by the Ethiopian agriculture sector including a lack of reliable market information, unreliable supply of produce, unreliable trading partners, very high transaction costs and efficiencies along the value chain (for example, grain typically exchanged hands 8 times, this has now been reduced to 2 or 3 exchanges).

The market information service developed by ECX is proving to be extremely popular. Farmers access live market information from the ECX via 4 different channels: by using their mobile phone to call a toll free number and listen to the prices in local languages (using IVR), by subscribing to receive the prices on their mobiles via SMS, from one of the 82 electronic ticker boards in rural areas which are customised into local languages, or via the ECX website. We didn’t hear how many farmers access the information via the ticker boards, but we did learn that the IVR channel receives 61,000 calls a day (or 1.1million a month) and the website gets 2000 hits a day- 50% of which come from outside Addis Ababa.

With number like this, the mobile component represents a big revenue opportunity for ECX. Currently the MIS is sustained through revenue generated from trading fees but they plan to make it self-sufficient.

Some of the other successes that the ECX can be proud of include a “T +1” clearing and settling time which means due to the partnerships in place with 10 local banks, farmers receive payment by 11am the day after a sale is agreed. This compares to a “T+3” time in Chicago or South Africa’s exchanges. Between 2011 and 2012, 109,500 transactions were made, with the value of commodities (coffee, sesame, pea beans and maize) traded totalling US $1.5 billion. During this time there were no defaults on payments or deliveries, no trading order errors and the system did not go down once.

When it comes to impact, there is plenty of evidence:

• 2.4 million smallholder farmers are connected via the ECX and have access to national markets
• Farmers have access to reliable and live market information which allows them to decide when to sell
• Coffee farmers are producing better quality coffee: the volume of top 3 grades has tripled in 18 months
• There is greater market transparency- farmers’ share of the final price has risen from 38% to 65%
• Convergence of local and national prices

We look forward to seeing the ECX grow and hopefully more African countries following suit. In the next phase of the ECX developments look out for a new training and advisory arm to be called the ECX Institute, warehouse receipt financing and futures trading.

The following are a few highlights from our panel of experts who shared their knowledge and experience researching and building mobile MIS.

• John Zoltner of FHI 360 gave a good explanation of the evolution of MIS from its origins as Famine Early Warning systems to customised information services and integration with exchanges (buyer/seller matchmaking).
• Andrew Kizoto, from the Department of Statistical Methods and Actuarial Sciences, shared highlights from his research on MIS activities in Mozambique.  He found that those receiving market information were 34% more likely to participate (sell) in the market and experienced a benefit/cost ratio of 6.
• Sharing best practices was Shaun Ferris of Catholic Relief Services.  Shaun highlighted the key differences between and approaches to Market Information, Market Intelligence and Market Linkages.  He also gave a great explanation of the various delivery channels and their suitability for different actors.
• We wrapped up the webinar with a case study from Esoko Malawi.  Robert Turner of ACDI/VOCA (Esoko Malawi Franchisee) highlighted the importance of commercial sustainability and the related implications (revenue share with key partners and the need to invest in training local resellers).

Finally, here are answers to a few key questions asked by the audience:

Q: Apart from market prices and weather, what other sorts of information were farmers most interested in learning about?

While the answer to this question will vary from market to market, we believe that farmers want and need information that supports them across the agricultural cycle.  This means not only market prices and weather, but especially agronomical tips (planting, growing, harvesting, pest and disease management).  Agri VAS offering more holistic support will tend to be more impactful and more successful.

Q: Are interactive voice response systems (IVR) a viable alternative when literacy is a problem?

IVR is a great way to work around the literacy challenge.  However its key to understand the degree that literacy is THE obstacle.  We’ve found many cases where farmers defined as illiterate were actually literate enough to understand the basic market pricing message.  In many regions, we’ve seen little evidence that literacy has been an obstacle to mobile money usage (see next question for more on SMS and delivery channels).

Q: If smallholders are the main target client, I’m interested to hear the pros and cons of radio vs. SMS mobile technology.  Old fashioned radio seems to be able to offer more.

The main advantage to the mobile channels is that its storable, retrievable and customisable.  A farmer can get the price most relevant to his situation, store it and retrieve it when needed for negotiations.  Alternatively, in many instances rural teledensity is lower than radio penetration, so radio might be the only option.  The best case might be a complimentary model where a radio show could discuss market trends while a farmer can get specific prices via mobile.

When I first heard about designing mobile Value Added Services (VAS) through user testing, I was not very convinced that we were headed in the right direction. How were we going to explain a virtual service to future rural users? Especially to the users who may struggle to use VAS from their basic phone or find it difficult to read SMS. I thought it was quite ambitious to expect that rural users would start using VAS for the first time in their life because of the value we were going to offer.

However, when I started to see user testing in action and witnessed the understanding by real people of mobile Value Added Services in rural areas of a country like Bangladesh, my assumption started changing.

In this blog post I’ll introduce some theoretical aspects of user testing, and hope to answer the fundamental question: ‘What is User Testing or User Centric Design?’

User or usability testing is a method to identify how easy it is to use something by testing it with real users and audiences. Users are asked to complete or experience tasks, typically while they are being observed by a researcher (either face-to-face or through a hidden camera). This allows researchers to see where users encounter problems and experience confusion. If a number of people encounter similar problems during user testing, recommendations will be made to overcome these usability issues.

Different types of user testing:

There are a few different types of usability and user testing based on reasons to conduct the usability research:

Comparative Usability Testing

This type is used to compare the usability of one product with another.

Explorative Usability Testing

Explorative usability testing can establish what content and functionality it should include to meet the needs of its users.

Usability Evaluation

This usability test introduces users to the new design to ensure it is intuitive to use and provides a positive user experience.

User testing can provide a variety of benefits, including:

• Provides quick fixes for immediate alteration.
• Help identify key issues in product designs/architecture.
• Raises issues not previously considered.
• Product usage behaviours (current and future) can be identified.
• Maximise conversion opportunities by identifying the key demand criteria – help to design the content hierarchy.
• Overcomes any in-house unhelpful policies – users are always right.
• Pull out creative marketing messages and promotional tactics.

In a forthcoming post, I’ll discuss what resources are required for user testing, as well as the four steps involved in user testing, including

• Defining the sample size
• Recruiting users
• Conducting the test
• Writing the report

Additionally, the mAgri team is expecting to experiment with user testing for mobile VAS in some parts of Indian and Africa, and hope to provide some real-life examples from the process soon.

Mobile and Development Intelligence (MDI) is a fantastic open access portal which offers data and analysis that stakeholders across the mobile and development sectors can use to support business decision making and to clarify the evidence of the socio-economic impact of the mobile industry in the developing world.

GSMA global research published last month highlighted a significant growth opportunity for the mobile industry and that future subscriber growth will come from currently ‘unconnected’ populations in developing countries, particularly people in rural areas. MDI allows mAgri service providers to analyse the growth of connections and identify the opportunity to develop services to meet this growing rural customer base.

It’s exciting to see the growth of the mAgri industry and to be able to demonstrate this on the MDI portal which now features around 60 mobile agriculture products and services across the developing world. These services have been developed by a range of service providers including mobile network operators, content providers and NGOs and cover a variety of product offerings from advisory and extension services, agriculture news, trading and financial services for the agriculture sector.

Do you want to add your mAgri product or service to MDI? Please send us details by using the form on our website and we’ll add your service to the site.

In addition to the mAgri products and services, MDI provides users with a range of metrics that you can tabulate, graph, map and export datasets with country-level dashboards available for more than 140 developing world countries. Data on agriculture (such as cereal yield and agriculture contribution to GDP) in the developing world can be compared with mobile industry data and other M4D areas such as mobile money, mHealth and mobile learning.

Another exciting feature of MDI is the landscape of more than 1100 organisation profiles, including all the mobile network operators and number of connections in the developing world. Users can view details of organisations, products and services on a global map and search for particular types of organisations – allowing stakeholders to identify each other, understand each other’s offerings and objectives, and form collaborations and partnerships.