As more people get involved in this exciting area and test new ways that mobile can bring benefits to the agriculture sector, there are more and more important lessons that we need to share with each other. The GSMA mAgri Programme does this via our blog and by creating toolkits and guidelines that include the lessons we’re learning along the way and some of what we see as best practice in the industry.

Below is an overview of some of the tools we’ve recently developed for people who are designing or rolling out a service that delivers information to farmers via their mobile. These are “working documents” and are being continuously updated as we learn more. Please get in touch if you’d like us to send any of these to you via email and if you have other resources that would be useful for the industry, we’d love to hear about them.

If you’re new to Agricultural Value Added Services (Agri VAS), we recommend you read the GSMA Agri VAS Market Entry Toolkit first.

Guidelines for Creating Agri VAS Content

This document is a guide for Agri VAS providers in creating valuable and impactful agricultural content suitable for delivery through mobile channels. Smallholder farmers are the priority customer for these types of information services. This document sets out to guide the reader to first understand the scale and scope of different agricultural content requirements and then lays out a step by step process to deliver on the requirements.

Agri VAS Usability Testing Guidelines

This document provides an introduction to Usability Testing and guidelines on conducting a user test for Agri VAS. It begins with an explanation of different approaches to user testing and the reasons why it is important. Step by step guidelines are provided on conducting Explorative Usability Testing and a Usability Evaluation and a sample script for a user test is also included.

Agri VAS Budget Calculation Toolkit

The purpose of this toolkit is to assist Agri VAS operators in understanding the financial requirements and implications of planning and launching an Agri VAS.  The excel document contains template worksheets with line items for Planning, Content, Technical, Helpline & Marketing costs.

Functional Requirements & Best Practice: SMS & IVR

The purpose of this document is to outline the different types of services that can be delivered by an Agri VAS provider using SMS and IVR channels. This will aid Agri VAS providers in identifying the types of services to include and how to plan for different scenarios that arise. The document also contains best practices for both SMS and IVR services

Agri VAS Technical Implementation Project Plan

This document outlines core technical activities to run a VAS/Agri VAS project from conception to launch. This document will be particularly helpful for those who are going to recruit technical suppliers/vendor to deliver services.

We welcome your feedback on all our resources and suggestions on what other tools would be useful. We’ll be developing more resources in the coming months so it’s helpful to understand what is needed by the industry. Get in touch to share your thoughts- mAgri@gsma.com.

What is Customer Retention Management?

It is difficult to define CRM as it is a variable and debatable issue. However a wide base of analysts view CRM as a strategic process to help organisations retain existing customers and avoid them defecting to other competitors. Customer retention is only possible when there is a quality relationship between the customer and supplier (in this case the Agri VAS provider). Usually a customer will stick to a particular brand or product as far as his or her basic needs continue to be properly fulfilled, and they will not opt for taking a risk by going for a new product. For example, I’m a loyal Apple fan and continue to buy Apple products despite the fact that there are lots of other great mobile phones available on the market. The higher the possibility of retaining customers, the higher the probability of net growth.

An example of a CRM initiative for Agri VAS

To carry out an efficient and effective CRM process, it is very important for Agri VAS providers to carefully evaluate and analyse the statistics that are relevant to issues which need to be resolved. In the context of Agri VAS, it is important to have a usage statistics tracking system in place to track the number of repeat customers vs. single time users, the average length of call, the location of farmers and so on.

Scrutinizing this relevant data can prove to be effective because appropriate actions can then be taken as a process of CRM. Generally reports, data and stats provided to higher management can be ineffective if they are too generic and don’t pinpoint those tricky areas where actions are required to avoid losing customers.

In this blog I am using an example to show how the analytics of an interactive voice response (IVR) menu can help to decide the CRM decisions to increase customer stickiness. If an IVR service is launched on a subscription model and the price packs don’t suit or match the users’ expectations, then the service will end up losing customers.

In such a situation, CRM decisions need to be taken after analysing the IVR access statistics such as the length of call and the information the customer listened to. If the statistics show that most of the people who use the IVR service hang up after listening to the price of different available packs, then it’s worth investigating and re-designing the price-packs or introducing other price-packs such as a Pay-As-You-Go model or free sampling to the users who didn’t go further than listening to the price options.

Once the changes have been made to the service, it needs to be decided what communication channel will be used to reach out to those users who hung up after listening to the price options, and try to bring them back to the service. Whether it’s by sending out SMS, using OBD (Out Bound Dialling) messages, or having call centre agents speak to the users directly, the message that the service has been changed (in this case, the price-points), needs to be communicated if users are going to be pulled back to the service.

This is an example of a CRM initiative. Here the channels and applications used (i.e. the SMS, OBD and Call Centre) can be defined as CRM solutions but actually it is a combination of the initial process of gathering the statistics, analysing them and taking the action to adapt the service and then inform the users to come back and try again.

Now we are waiting to see how this works in real life for the Agri VAS we’re working with under the mFarmer Initiative, and what lessons we can take away for the industry – hopefully some exciting things to share with our readers soon!

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“Bonjour! Hier, Temp – 8, Pluie – 0mm. Artichaut: 42 mins a debit 20 m3/hr/ha”

(Hello! Yesterday, Temp-8, Rain-0mm. Artichcoke: 42 min at rate of 20 m3/hr/hectare”)

In water-scarce Morocco, daily messages like this one ensure that farmers get all the information they need in order to conserve this precious resource.  Drawing on the nearly 100% mobile penetration rate in the country, Souktel, in partnership with USAID’s Morocco Economic Competitiveness Program (MEC), mobile network Meditel, and the Moroccan Ministry of Agriculture (MoA), launched a Market Price Information and Irrigation Advisory Service in October 2012—helping farmers get better access to irrigation and market price data, and leveraging the potential of basic mobile phones to transform agricultural practices across the country. In line with GSMA’s belief that mobiles provide a meaningful platform to connect smallholder farmers with timely, vital information, the MEC initiative helps farmers make more informed decisions that ultimately boost their productivity.

The Irrigation Advisory Service, which aims to improve water efficiency on local farms, offers basic irrigation advice based on current weather conditions—all through SMS messaging.  “The process is a lot more efficient now [than before the mobile service was in place],” noted Andrew Watson, Chief of Party for the MEC project, in a recent interview. “The farmers just…send an SMS saying what their pumping capacity is–and based on the weather data for their location, they’ll get an automated message back with specific instructions saying, for example, ‘For tomatoes, you need to turn the pump on for two hours’.”  Watson says that despite it being early in the game, both of these mobile services have been a huge success: “There’s been great uptake so far–and preliminary surveys show people are really using the information, saving water, saving money, becoming more competitive.”

The project has also developed a Market Price Information service which lets farmers and vendors post & search for real-time market prices for crops, via SMS.  A Souktel-designed mobile platform is integrated directly with the Ministry’s price database: As MoA market reporters capture prices across 11 major cities and 25 rural marketplaces, farmers get real-time access to this key information. Leveraging Souktel’s “mobile matching” software, farmers create a profile listing the crops they farm, along with their location–and then query the system to get real-time market price information based on this profile. The cost to each user is less than a dollar per search–a huge savings when compared to the cost of making phone calls to track down buyers, or traveling long distances to the market just to research price data. With this service, Souktel and partners reduce the information disadvantage which many local farmers face when going to market with their goods–and thus increase the farmers’ ability to get the right price for their produce, at the right time.

Lessons Learned 

What were the key factors which made these services successful? Looking back, here’s what we at Souktel have learned:

• First, meet your stakeholders in person—all of them—during the service design phase. Our trips to meet with MoA officials, USAID project staff, and farmer/trader cooperatives in the Doukkala-Abda and Oriental regions were crucial to ensuring that our software development team created a system that actually met the needs of end users. Only by meeting in person, on a regular basis, were we able to work through the exact ‘use cases’ of each stakeholder group.
• A second key lesson is that partnerships matter: Securing the support of the (Orange-owned) Meditel mobile network ensured that the service was priced affordably, was scalable across the country, and backed up by robust network infrastructure. In addition, when mobile network partners understand a campaign’s goals, and are invested in its success, the testing and launch process is typically much smoother. Instead of a months-long coordination process between Meditel and Souktel tech staff, the service was ready to launch in a matter of weeks.
• Finally, pilot trials–which emulate actual use cases (e.g. a farmer’s creation of a user profile to register for irrigation info)–are crucial. Pre-launch testing of applications by users in the field guarantees that developers and partner stakeholders can collect relevant feedback, and make useful modifications before an official launch.

To sum up: Meet your users, build solid partnerships, and pilot before launching. The end result will likely be healthier artichokes—and better livelihoods for the hard-working farmers who grow them.

The majority of the population in developing countries is dependent on agriculture to provide for their basic needs: food and capital. The OECD recognizes agriculture as one of the main drivers for poverty reduction, when the surplus of unused products can be used for trade on local or international markets. While recognizing the need for trade, the majority of the people working in agriculture don’t have access to up-to-date and reliable information to optimize their yield and trade profits. Mobile technology provides for an optimal, effective and cost-efficient way to provide the people most in need with vital information and the possibility to mutually communicate.

Text to Change (TTC) has set up a variety of mAgriculture projects in Africa and South-America where communities at grassroots level receive daily information and tips regarding agricultural practices, market prices and weather forecasts on their mobile phones. Although network coverage is sometimes challenging in rural areas throughout Africa, mobile coverage is expanding and mobile technology is rapidly gaining grounds. Already, mobile penetration in East and West African countries like Ghana, Uganda and Kenya reaches over 100%.

How does TTC work?

TTC makes use of simple, basic mobile technology to reach target audiences at grassroots level with information that is vital for optimal cultivation and trade. After creating awareness for a campaign through broadcasting on traditional mass media, as radio, television and posters, TTC focuses on narrowcasting by targeting individuals with tailor-made information through their mobile phones. People can opt-in and use the system through SMS text messaging, whereas illiterate audiences receive the required information in voice messages through an Interactive Voice Response platform (IVR). Using voice enhances accessibility and inclusiveness of the system. The information requirements differ as each party operates in various steps of the agricultural value chain. Setting up an mAgri system therefore requires careful planning and design, where it can take up to one year to align technical and content partners. The comprehensive design will ensure that all the needs of the various partners are accommodated for. Cost factors for each system are the payments for the provision of reliable data from the content providers and expenses for the technological and mobile infrastructure – the platform and the connections to the network operators. TTC supports organisations in each step of the design, implementation and evaluation phase.

Business Models

There is much debate about workable, sustainable, inclusive business models for mobile services throughout the developing world. The economic development sector, including mFishery and mAgriculture, provides perfect opportunities to implement paid services, where small payments are rewarded with valuable, reliable and up-to-date information. TTC sees an increase of interest from public and private, local African and international organisations to get involved in the development of mAgri information systems. Especially trader and commercial organisations recognize the added value of providing farmers with agronomic tips and tricks to increase their knowledge level, therewith ensuring a certain quality level of their produce. The increase in quality translates into bigger revenues and profits. Additionally, insurance companies also include information provision in their agronomical insurance packages. Their main driver being to prepare farmers for extreme weather and assist in cultivation, to decrease the loss of crops and assure crop returns.

Although today a barrier still exists for African organisations to enter trade on international markets, applying basic and simple mobile tools can close this gap rapidly. Successful mAgri projects are based on comprehensive program design, an alignment of public and private partners and implementation of intuitive, inclusive and sustainable business models, to allow African agricultural organisations onto the global marketplace.

Mobile for Development

Connecting and providing services for the next billion mobile customers was a key theme throughout Mobile World Congress this year. The number of unique mobile subscribers has experienced double-digit growth over the last five years in developing countries and continues to grow. By contrast, access to basic services such as electricity and banking remains low.  There were a number of sessions that looked at how mobile can be a tool to deliver essential information and financial services or as a means of identification.

In addition to our own Mobile Agriculture event, the other GSMA Mobile for Development programmes held their own seminars on mLearning, Mobile Money for the Unbanked, mHealth, mWomen, Mobile Identity, Mobile Enabled Community Services (MECS) and Disaster Response. From the mobile money events we heard that there are now 150 live mobile money services for the unbanked of which 41 launched in 2012 and there are more than 30 million users. Operators revealed how it has become core to their growth, for example, Millicom relayed that by the end of 2012, 8% of Millicom’s total mobile customer base was using some form of mobile payment service and in Tanzania the penetration rate is as high as 37%. The mWomen seminar launched their new report which finds women in developing countries represent a significant underserved market and a commercial opportunity for mobile financial service providers.  The GSMA, with the support of the UK Government, announced the launch of their newest programme, Mobile Enabled Community Services (MECS) which explores how the mobile industry can support access to both energy and water services in off-grid areas. 

Operator seminars – growth through emerging markets

Two seminars that caught my attention were ‘Connecting the Next Billions to the Internet’ and ‘Regional Focus: Sub-Saharan Africa’.

Connecting the Next Billions to the Internet:  Panellists explained that it took 22 years for the first 2 billion to join the internet and the next 2 billion will join in 5 years. The next billion people to connect to the internet will come from developing markets and through mobile routes but a number of challenges will first need to be overcome, with device and service affordability at the top of the list. Manoj Kohil, CEO and joint MD of Bharti Airtel, called on device manufacturers to provide $10 price points for mobile broadband dongles and $30 price points for smartphones.

Regional Focus: Sub-Saharan Africa:  All panellists agreed that Sub-Saharan Africa was a major growth opportunity for regional operators that are able to extend affordable services to rural areas. Growth will come from rural areas which currently have lower penetration and will start with voice and text messages before the rural areas become matured enough to migrate to data. Panellists discussed how to manage operations to ensure profitability. Airtel spoke of the importance to reduce costs such as sharing cell towers. MTN relayed how price elasticity in Africa is low and price competition can be more harmful than fruitful for mobile operators; others commented that only the first or possibly second operator per country is likely to be profitable. There were many examples of how mobile can be used for social benefit in Africa – the Nigerian minister for communications spoke about how mobile can be used for development and gave the example of how subsidies for farmers are now distributed via mobile money which is resulting in millions of dollars’ worth of savings.

New handsets unveiled targeted at developing markets:  Nokia CEO Stephen Elop revealed a new range of feature phones at lower price points and targeted at developing markets.  The new Nokia  entry phone 105 has a standby time of 35 days, durable dust and splash-proof keypad and a price point of €15. A more upmarket feature phone 301 costing €65 was released and can access data content. Microsoft announced as part of its 4Afrika initiative a lower cost windows smartphone (Huawei) and the use of white space to deliver data services. The claim is that white space BSTs can be deployed for around $2500 with a much smaller footprint (physical and energy). This could prove an interesting solution for extended data bandwidth into rural areas and supplement 3G and 2G data networks and M2M services.

GSMA mAgri Seminar: Taking Mobile Agriculture Innovation to Market

 For our second mAgri seminar at MWC, we had a fantastic line-up from Vodafone Turkey, China Mobile, Tigo Tanzania, HandyGo India, Nano Ganesh and IFDC/Grameen Foundation.  These speakers shared insights from their experience of creating mAgri services for millions of farmers. I started the session by talking about the market opportunity – mobile phones have has now reached rural areas where other forms of agriculture services does not reach and at the same time the number of people involved in agriculture represent the largest potential customer segment for Operators. There almost 100 mAgri products and services on the GSMA MDI tracker and it’s clear that mobile agriculture has become an exciting growth area for the mobile industry.  Reaching scale is usually necessary for financial sustainability and the first panel of Operators spoke about how they have taken their products to market to reach scale. We also showed a short video of farmers in Kenya, Tanzania and India telling us what their information needs are and how mobile can help with access. Click here to watch the video.

The CEO of Vodafone Turkey, Serpil Timuray presented the Vodafone Farmers’ Club in Turkey which has 700,000 members, has sent over 290 million agriculture SMS to date and has estimated to provide a 12% increase in productivity to farmers. Serpil explained that services that provide a social contribution have now become core to the strategy for mobile operators.

China Mobile provided details of its agri-info service that has reached over 50 million customers; information is primarily provided via a call centre that has hundreds of agri-call centre agents to answer farmers’ calls. Dan Zhou from China Mobile explained how he sees a potential market opportunity of 700-800 million farmers in China.

Praveen Rajpal the CEO of HandyGo (a VAS company in India) outlined their new agriculture service in India called mKisan [1] which has already topped 100,000 crop and livestock farmers in less than 4 months using a voice based service and is designed to reach over one million customers by the end of next year.

Tigo Tanzania was represented by my colleague Natalia Pshenichnaya who spoke about Tigo’s new service Tigo Kilimo, which has been launched across Tanzania to reach hundreds of thousands of farmers. The service has been carefully designed to ensure its usability and relevance for farmers. If Tigo can create a popular product then there is the opportunity to take this to other countries to be adapted and launched.

For more information on each of these services and contact details- please click here.

Key takeaways

Some key takeaways from the panel discussion included:

• Partnerships continue to be absolutely crucial to ensure quality of service and relevance, and to develop services that can reach the market at scale (using the respective assets from the mobile and agriculture partner)
• Operators continue to investigate different business models to ensure the price point for farmers remains affordable, partnering with business or government who might become the “customer” of the service is one option
• The future of mAgri services will focus on ensuring personalised and relevant services (including new ways to use location based tools) and integration with financial services to provide a holistic product to support farmers’ business in the form of payments, credit, savings or insurance.

In the seminar we also highlighted two new innovations using mobile to benefit the agriculture sector.  Nano Ganesh is a service that uses machine to machine technology to facilitate more economical irrigation, allowing farmers in India to use their mobile to control their water pump. Over 15,000 farmers have bought this product and the company (Ossian Agro Automation) sees potential to support many more farmers. The second product was from IFDC and Grameen Foundation which uses a barcode (which works like an airtime scratch-off coupon) as a way to detect whether an agro-chemical is counterfeit or genuine. This is important in countries like Uganda where it is estimated that 40% of chemicals are counterfeit.

Want to know more? You can download the slides from the seminar and we’ll be sharing the video recording of the seminar on our website next week.

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!