Posts Tagged ‘Agriculture’

The difference a CKW makes

Lydia Namubiru is a Partnership Analyst working with Grameen Foundation’s Community Knowledge Worker program in Uganda.

Charles Mukonyi

Charles Mukonyi

For a long time, Charles Mukonyi of Gamatui parish in Kapchorwa had a problem with his chickens – the hens died off soon after hatching new ones. Three months ago, he was visited by his neighbor Tabitha Salimo who told him that she had a phone that has huge amounts of agricultural knowledge to answer many of the problems farmers face. Naturally, the first thing Charles asked about was the hen problem. Tabitha checked her phone and informed Charles that his hens were likely to be catching diseases from their predecessors by sitting on the same hay when incubating eggs. She advised him change the hay for every newly incubating hen. He saw the wisdom of that and adopted the practice. He has not lost a hen since!

Around the same time, in Kapwata parish, about 60km away from Charles’ home into the slopes of mountain Elgon, another farmer faced a big eminent loss. One of Saulo Mwanga’s goats developed a disease he had not seen before - boils on the skin. He feared he would lose it. A very unfortunate possibility because, like he says, “when you lose one goat, you have lost about sh100,000” (or $50USD). Fortunately, he had an idea about where he could get help. He had been consulting Alfred Chepsikor, his area Community Knowledge Worker (CKW) for routine farming information like market prices and weather forecasts. He knew he might have an answer for the goat problem. Indeed the CKW did. Chepsikor searched his phone and saw the same symptoms described in a piece of informa­tion about goat diseases. With the symptoms’ description was a sugges­tion on what drugs the farmer could use to treat the goat. Neither of the farmers knew the drug but they wrote it down on a piece of paper which Mwanga went with to agricultural input stores. So important was saving his goat that Mwanga went across the border to near-by Kenya to find the drug he had been advised to use. The goat is completely healed now.

Caroline Chelangat with her children

Caroline Chelangat with her children

As one traverses Kapchorwa, one finds many more success sto­ries big and small. For Caroline Chelangat of Sipi, it is was a tip to add aloe vera to the water for her chicken that saved 10 of out of her flock of 20. Unfortunately at the time she consulted with the CKW, she already had lost the first ten. Aloe vera is known to have a medicinal properties including improving immunity to diseases. Albert Kibet, also of Kapkwata is hoping for better banana and cof­fee harvests this year after he started adding compost manure to his plantation on the advice of his CKW.

Asked what he would have done had the CKW information resource not existed, Mwanga says he would have just tried to guess at a solution. After all he lives 47kms uphill and away from the Kap­chorwa, the nearest township where one might expect to run into an agriculturalist of any expertise. Looking at a slowly recovering coffee plant that he had sprayed against insects with a drug advised by his CKW, Mwanga says, “I might even have sprayed the plant with a drug left over from spraying the cows just to try [a solu­tion]. If you are lucky, it works. Otherwise, you just lose it.” It is the difference a CKW makes - where farmers depended on luck in the past, they now have access to scientifically tried, proven and recommended solutions.

Simple mobile tools to combat fake agricultural inputs

Whitney Gantt is the Partnerships Manager for Grameen Foundation’s Community Knowledge Worker program in Uganda.

Poor farmers in Uganda routinely struggle with access to agricultural inputs, such as fertilizer and improved seed varieties, that would boost their crop yields.  Access to improved inputs is one of the highest impact scenarios for improving farmer productivity.  In the right context, the application of fertilizer can significantly increase  yields, by up to 300% - which means the potential to triple income.

Two of the chief constraints for a smallholder farmer to buy these inputs is lack of access to fertilizer in a quantity they can afford (inputs are often sold in large quantities priced beyond the means of a typical smallholder farmer) and lack of trust that the input is real and not a counterfeit product.  Smallholder farmers are risk averse - buying a fake product can mean financial ruin or worse so building trust in the efficacy of the inputs is extremely important.

The first constraint of high prices can be tackled through “sacheting” - the practice of breaking larger quantity products down into smaller sized or “sachets” which yields a price point that a small-holder farmer can afford.  The second constraint - knowing whether or not your seeds will sprout or the fertilizer will really work -  is a tougher problem to address.

One potential solution has previously been used to counter prescription medicine counterfeiting in West Africa.  Sproxil and mPedigree have developed a solution that uses a unique number on “real” products that can be sent via SMS text to a verification center which responds by SMS text that the product is “real”.  A client can send the SMS, or ask the seller to do it in front of him or her, to verify the medicine is real before they make the purchase.  This approach could easily be ported over to protecting agricultural inputs from counterfeiting.  At Grameen Foundation’s Uganda AppLab we are considering working with a few partners who are already planning to pilot such a program.

We would be glad to hear from you in the comments section of your opinion of this solution and any other ideas you might have to help farmers access agricultural inputs.

How did James Amadi benefit from his local Community Knowledge Worker?

James Amadi with his green coffee trees

Edward Chelangat, Grameen Foundation’s Kapchorwa, Uganda based field officer, sent in the report below.  

 

“James Amadi is a farmer who uses CKW services.  He has benefited from coffee tips and price information.  His coffee trees are green in a dry season largely because of following CKW advice on manure application.  James also said the CKW has helped him identify diseases in his coffee plantation, for example leaf rust which he though it was coffee berry disease. He sprayed orious fungicide which cleared it off.”

 

 

A few tweaks in the CKW intervention can deliver more impact to farmers

A scene from the local Pabbo, Uganda market

 Lydia Namubiru is the Partnership Analyst on our Community Knowledge Worker team in Uganda.

Samuel Olara’s chickens were getting weak and sleepy. He feared they had caught something that would kill them and he didn’t know how to save them. Fortunately, he knew someone who might know. He walked 2 kms to the local CKWs’ home to consult on chicken diseases and their treatments. The CKW in turn consulted his phone and advise Olara to treat his chicken with soda ash. They quickly recovered and were doing well three weeks later when a Grameen Founda­tion team visited his home in Pabbo.

Information can indeed positively change outcomes for many a farmer. However, sometimes, the information package needs to be deeper and more varied than a single remedy or other tip. Micheal Nyeko’s experience illustrates one rea­son why. He is a regular client to the local CKW. He says that he often asks for market prices. Unfortunately, he can’t al­ways put this information to good use. “Sometimes you learn that the price is so much better in the next district. It may even be double but you can’t afford to go there. Can your organization work with organizations that provide transport so they can connect us to those markets?” Nyeko asked the Grameen Foundation staff that visited Pabbo in January. He certainly makes a sound suggestion on how to remedy the situation; albeit one that requires significant investment. The CKW team also has an idea of a technology solution that might help overcome the farmer’s problem while bypassing the logistical requirements of sending out transporters to help farmers. Once the planned mobile market place applica­tion is deployed, we will investigate how much it pulls bulk buyers to rural farm-gates and in the process saves farmers the need to transport produce to physical markets.

Sometimes it takes less than a whole new technical solution to provide information that is complete enough to be actionable for the farmer. Take Alice Aya, an elderly farmer still in Pabbo. She and her farmer group learnt of the op­portunity to sell grain directly to the World Food Program (WFP) from their CKW and have agreed to work together to raise the quantities required by the warehouses. They have since raised 80 kgs of maize amongst themselves, well below the 3000kgs minimum the Gulu warehouse will store but a good start nonetheless. Unfortunately, they have now run out of storage space. “Can you build us some stores here in the villages where we can keep the produce while we raise the big quantities?,” the elderly woman also asked the Grameen Foundation team. Such stores as she suggests in fact already exist or are being planned. Based on her feedback, the CKW team will be publishing a comprehensive directory of WFP rural satellite collection and bulking cen­ters so that farmers like Aya will know where to store and/or minimally process their bulk purchase as they prepare to engage the bigger warehouses.

The valuable insights farm visits like these give us confirm and affirm the need to stay in touch with them. As we move forward with the CKW project, we hope to even further map gaps in the intervention and information it provides as well as those in the broader agricultural system that need to be filled. We are hopeful that this work will go a long way in delivering impact to the farmer.

A Day in The Life of a (Female) Community Knowledge Worker

CKW's in training

Right now we’re in a planning phase—which ultimately means we’re wrestling with the “big” challenges that become even more significant at scale.  We’re building partnerships to begin recruiting Community Knowledge Workers (CKWs) in early 2010 and that has me thinking about one of those challenges: how do we ensure that female farmers have an equal opportunity to participate as CKWs and that they have the same access to services offered through the CKW channel?

In the pilot we learned that women do most of the manual labor in farming in Uganda and will often be the decision makers when it comes to adopting new agronomic techniques.  Our observations also show that they’re less likely to own their own phones and to approach a male CKW.  During the pilot, 33% of CKWs were women, but if we really want to reach female farmers we will need to recruit equal women and men to participate in the program and ensure that both enjoy the same benefits.  So how do we do it? (more…)

What Do Farmers Want To Know?

Calling into Question Box

Calling into Question Box

During the test of concept phase of our Community Knowledge Worker initiative, AppLab Question Box (AQB) was one of the services that the CKWs provided to rural communities. Grameen Foundation worked with Appfrica Labs, and US based NGO, Open Mind, to pilot this service.  AQB is a live, local language hotline service that brings the Internet and expert advice to the homes and market stalls of individuals who may never see a computer, visit an agricultural specialist, or read in English.  Between April and September, villagers in Uganda’s Mbale and Bushyeni districts had access to the service to ask agricultural, education, recent events and other questions. (more…)

Agriculture and Mobile Phones Come Together With Our Community Knowledge Worker Project in Uganda

CKW Joseph Nashimolo

Last week in Uganda I was fortunate to attend a meeting in Busano subcounty, Mbale district, with some of the Community Knowledge Workers  (CKWs) – local farmer leaders empowered with mobile applications to improve the livelihoods of their communities by distributing and collecting relevant information about agriculture – and their clients, the smallholder farmers we all seek to benefit.  There was a lively discussion of the pros and cons of a variety of information services we have been testing nearby.  One farmer, Elias Mabala, then stood up and spoke about how his income improved more than 100% last harvest by virtue of having greater access to market information through the CKW assigned to serve the information needs arising in his village.  Stories like that explain why we come to work each day. (more…)