ICT Update's List: Innovation

A Kenyan village tweets to fight crime, foster hope

When the administrative chief of this western Kenyan village received an urgent 4 a.m. call that thieves were invading a school teacher's home, he sent a message on Twitter. Within minutes, residents in this village of stone houses gathered outside the home, and the thugs fled.

My wife and I were terrified,” said teacher Michael Kimotho. “But the alarm raised by the chief helped.”

The tweet from Francis Kariuki was only his latest attempt to improve village life by using the micro-blogging site Twitter. Mr. Kariuki regularly sends out tweets about missing children and farm animals, showing that the power of social media has reached even into a dusty African village. Lanet Umoja is 160 kilometres west of the capital, Nairobi.

Mr. Kariuki's official Twitter page shows 300 followers, but the former teacher estimated that thousands of the 28,000 residents in his area receive the messages he sends out directly and indirectly. He said many of his constituents, mostly subsistence farmers, cannot afford to buy smartphones, but can access tweets through a third-party mobile phone application. Others forward the tweets via text message.

Online community increases the capacity of rural radio

Farm Radio International recently launched a new social media community for radio broadcasters. Known as Barza radio, it is a web-based meeting place where African broadcasters can seek advice, access and share content, meet colleagues from across Africa, and exchange experiences.

The online community project receives support from the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation ACP-EU (CTA) and IDRC. The project aims to increase the extent to which rural radio helps African small-scale farmers meet their food security, farming, and livelihood goals.

Internet and Social Media for Agriculture in rural kenya
Posted by Admin at 11:39 Labels: ICT in agriculture, youth in agriculture Kenya
Information and communication technology in agriculture is an emerging field in rural Kenya. The Government is implementing digital villages’ project which focuses on the development rural areas through the use of ICT. This will involve application of innovative ways to use Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the rural areas for information sourcing, and social media for networking with collaborators and stakeholders in the agriculture value chain. Once the ICT project is operational it will facilitate dissemination of accurate, timely and relevant agriculture market and extension information as well as major government services to the community. This will create a good environment for competitive profitable agriculture, leading to self employment, food security, income generation and poverty reduction.

For the Internet to be an effective tool for rural farmers’ access to agriculture services three complementary things need to be in place namely, implementation of Government policies supportive to development of physical Internet access in the rural areas, which is already in place in Kenya. Secondly the rural people need support in learning how to use the Internet and interpret the information for application in agriculture. Thirdly institutions will need to produce information in forms that are compatible with the farmer’s way of learning.

The Butterfly Project trains rural children to be the future visionaries for their own villages and funds a comprehensive education at a special school by using their own land to grow high value crops

Social Enterprise Africa CIC (SEA) is working towards
creating a sustainable program to nurture and develop young social
entrepreneurs in Africa. In 2008 the
Butterfly project was launched to identify promising students from rural areas and the Kampala slums. Currently SEA is
is working in conjunction with two other organizations to implement this plan
in Uganda – Chrysalis Limited and the Chrysalis Foundation (due to open in
January 2012). Chrysalis Limited
oversees the Butterfly project based at the Chrysalis Center (space currently
rented from Life in Africa) and the Chrysalis School (currently housed adjacent
to the Creamland Primary School adjacent to and serving the Acholi Quarter and
a short walk to the Chrysalis center where the children recruited from Northern
Uganda reside). The Chrysalis Foundation
will be responsible for overseeing financial resources.

Africa: Surfing the Radio Waves for Sustainable Agriculture

While the use of mobile phones is rapidly surging across Africa, access gaps persist between urban and rural users. But a new generation of social entrepreneurs is remedying this problem by combining new and old media to reach rural populations.

Twenty-nine-year-old Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu is one of such entrepreneurs who sees the mobile telephony gap as a call to innovate. His organization connects rural farmers with the information they need through a combination of mobile telephony and radio, which is widely used in rural areas.

Agricultural Innovation Systems: An Investment Sourcebook contributes to the identification, design, and implementation of the investments, approaches, and complementary interventions most likely to strengthen agricultural innovation systems (AIS) and to promote innovation and equitable growth. The Sourcebook provides a menu of tools and operational guidance, as well as good practice lessons, to illustrate approaches to designing, investing in, and improving these systems.

David Rowan thinks Africa is the next place where great technological innovations will happen. He will explain how startup entrepreneurs should move there.

A curated statistics, charts, graphs and observations presentation

New ICT solutions for agricultural development are being developed at break-neck speed, and its hard to keep track of what’s out there, what works, and how it best fits into your project. At this month’s Tech Talk, GBI will demonstrate how ICT applications can complement a value chain approach to agricultural development, and we will bring in users and developers of these apps to explain their tools and how they are implemented. We’ll also unveil a new and useful interactive tool “Ag Apps Along the Value Chain,” that maps a collected inventory of over 120 apps and ICT solutions along the agricultural value chain.

The SEED Initiative is a global partnership for action on sustainable development and the green economy. Founded by UNEP, UNDP and IUCN at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, SEED supports innovative small-scale and locally driven entrepreneurships around the globe which integrate social and environmental benefits into their business model.

For over a decade, Africa’s ICT entrepreneurs have struggled to make sense of how to innovate and make money on a continent that was largely connected to the outside world by satellite and extremely expensive fibre. Now with cheaper wholesale bandwidth and falling retail prices, the season is going from an unforgiving winter to perhaps a long Summer of Love. Russell Southwood looks at the changes afoot that are helping Africa’s ICT entrepreneurs stand a better chance of success.

In many African countries building a startup is not for the faint hearted. Choosing an idea, putting together a team and getting the technical stuff right is only the beginning. You need to understand the operating environment and the needs of the market. Have your ears to the ground such that you can even hear the grasshoppers jumping. Access to risk capital is almost nonexistent in a lot of countries, power outages are the order of the day while access to reliable bandwidth traditionally costs an arm and a leg. But guess what? The benefits far outweigh the risks

Coders4Africa provides African programmers and developers a gateway to free high quality training and certification in the main technologies and platforms that currently dominate the software development industry. The main objective is to provide free training for 1000 African Software developers and programmers by the year 2016.
Human capital betterment is indispensable in reducing poverty and developing any type of economy. The programme hopes to create a community of African programmers that share and transfer knowledge among themselves and to future generation of programmers.

Seeding a Green Revolution for Africa will require developing innovation systems that match each country and science and technology approaches that are relevant to local agriculture, according to a UN report.

"There has been a tendency to focus on applying international models of agricultural development without questioning their applicability to local circumstances," says the 'Technology and Innovation Report 2010: Enhancing Food Security in Africa through Science, Technology and Innovation' released by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

"When the new African Agricultural Revolution is eventually implemented, it is likely to be built on Africa's own indigenous technology and knowledge requirements and the nutrition and food security needs of its people," says the report.

Asia's Green Revolution swept across the continent in the 1960s, leading to high-yielding grain varieties, but Africa is yet to see the same and all eyes are focused on how to bring about a similar advance in Africa.

Agriculture Business Information System - Jamaica
Agriculture info system for Jamaica farmers and traders with 100,000 registered producers www.abisjamaica.com.jm
Country:
Jamaica
Sector:
Livelihood opportunities
Project owner:
Rural Agriculture Development Agency (RADA)
Start date:
1999-08-01
Independent continuation date:
2004-03-01
Stopped after implementation date:
Type:
on the ground project
Target group:
producers and buyers
ICT Tool:
Internet, Database
Summary:

The Jamaican Agricultural Sector is challenged by the changes heralding the New World Order in which technological advances are used to propel the industry and new trading arrangements are being imposed under the banner of globalisation. Lack of adequate communication between the producers and the buyers has resulted in inadequate planning and ultimately an unstable market environment. This has led to increased importation of commodities, which are also locally produced, lack of information on improved production practices and increased competition in the marketplaces.

It is therefore necessary to link all the relevant participants in an Agriculture Business Information System (ABIS) in order to achieve a more structured and co-ordinated Agricultural Sector.
Project context:

ICT and agriculture is a key socio-economic leverage sector in Jamaica. The need for ICT was identified as a crucial component in the strategy for the improvement of the production and marketing of agricultural commodities and domestic food products in particular. The small farmers in Jamaica are being forced to identify more with the needs of the marketplace and improve their quality and productivity in order to compete especially on the local market but also in the export markets.

What does it take for an African startup to gain major recognition? Providing solutions to some of the continent’s most pressing problems is a start. A powerful social media presence helps get the word out. A unique idea is a must. More important, it seems, are an adequate business environment and decent infrastructure.

It’s no surprise, but few game-changing African tech startups exist outside of a handful of key nations. “Best of” lists rarely include companies outside South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana. Not one (of five) reputable startup lists published so far in 2012 has included a company from outside of South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Cameroon, or Zimbabwe – arguably the most technologically-advanced nations in Africa. In fact, 85% of startups on the five most-shared lists of the year are from four nations. That’s right – only seven African countries have representation on these lists. Of course, tech startups exist in many other countries, but they either lack in terms of competitiveness with other African companies or they have a marketing disadvantage (ie. language barrier, state-run media).

How to nurture entrepreneurs and stimulate innovation

Open innovation is key to the success of iHub and can change the working culture of any community of innovators, says Linda Kamau.

iHub is a network and meeting place that enables Kenya's innovators to bring their ideas to fruition. Through iHub, the technology community, industry, academia, investors and venture capitalists can meet, share ideas and collaborate.

The centre is the first of its kind to operate in Kenya. It allows technologies to progress from the ideas stage to becoming real products and the key to its effectiveness is open innovation — the process of combining internal and external ideas, as well as internal and external paths to market, to advance the development of new technologies.

Agriculture needs better innovation, not technology

16 September 2009 | EN | FR

Pilot projects in India and Nigeria point to possible benefits of a new approach to agricultural innovation, say Andy Hall and Susanna Thorp.

We live in an era of unprecedented technological advancement. So why does technical change in agriculture continue to be slow and patchy?

One possible explanation is that the importance of farmers' capacity to access and use information for innovation has been overshadowed by the conventional view that change is driven primarily by new technology and farmer-led technical improvements.

Similarly, insufficient attention may have been given to the fact that the capacity for innovation in agriculture is influenced not only by farmers' skills and resources, but also by the wider network of links and relationships in which farmers are embedded, which help ideas to diffuse and find new uses.

These hypotheses are currently being tested by a research project in India and Nigeria on the long-standing problem of fodder scarcity, using what is widely referred to as an 'innovation systems' perspective.

Mobile phones offer individuals in rural populations the ability to access and interact with information services and databases.

Consider the numerous ways in which mobile telephony facilitates every day endeavours in addition to offering phone calls and text messaging. The technologies and applications vary from the developed areas to the developing regions, however, people in the most remote and marginalised places of the world are also benefiting greatly from the opportunities that the technology offers to improve their social and economic conditions.

In reference to agricultural development, the positive impact of mobile telephony becomes evident through the generation of new or increased revenue for the producers and farmers, as a result of the increased communication with suppliers, buyers, producers, and stakeholders. There are various initiatives by civil society organisations and private companies that provide access to market information, offer guidance, notifications, and technical assistance, along with a wide depository of valuable data.

Currently, there are various organisations and projects in rural areas using SMS to disseminate information to the population, such as agriculture and crops information, weather updates, news and market prices, natural disaster information and so on. Mobile phones offer individuals in rural populations the ability to access and interact with information services and databases. For example, farmers could easily inquire or receive the updated price of a product by sending a text message to a specific number.

The challenges faced by rural communities in Latin America include the lack of communication infrastructure and limited finances available to provide this infrastructure. With these as setbacks, there are little or no communication technologies to link the inhabitants to the city The project brings Wi-Fi connectivity to these seemly unreachable areas in an inexpensive manner, thereby connecting remote areas to the internet. The project is unique because of its use of Wi-Fi technology. It connects rural communities across Latin America and the Caribbean to the internet using a single antenna. The project has successfully been rolled out in the mountainous regions of the Amazon rainforest, Ecuador, Panama, Peru El Salvador Mexico and Argentina.