Question Box operators in Uganda taking questions from farmers. (Photo courtesy of Grameen Foundation via flickr)

A number of studies and funding have in recent years been dedicated to develop mechanisms through which Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) like mobile phones, Internet (e-mail and Web sites), radios, printed media forms and video among others can be used to improve farmers’ access to information relevant to farming and improving their livelihoods. Question Box is one of the latest initiatives that is being fronted as effective in helping farmers access the information they need. The initiative involves setting up “question boxes” where farmers can ask questions on any issue and get answers.

Gerald Businge interviewed Rose Shuman, the founder and CEO of Question Box on how this initiative is different from other initiatives and why it is important to agricultural development.

Q. What is Question Box all about?

Question Box is a project of Open Mind, a nonprofit corporation headquartered in Santa Monica, California, USA. Question Box is an information service we are undertaking in Uganda and India. The core of our service is live, local language information. In Uganda, 40 community knowledge workers are being utilized to promote our service, person-to-person in rural areas. In India, we are delivering information via our signature Question Boxes.

Q. What exactly is the Question Box and how is it related to giving information to farmers?

The Question Box is a simple telephone intercom through which we connect farmers to our live Internet information service. It requires no literacy or computer skills. Users place a free call by pushing the green button on the question Box. They connect to an Operator sitting in front of a computer with internet access. Users ask the operator questions in their local language. The operator goes online and finds their answers, translating English results into the local language and relay the information back to the farmers. It enables farmers to get the information they need and boost their farming.

Q. How is information accessed by farmers important in agricultural development?

Many farmers today need to be knowledgeable on many things, including soil, plant cycles and different types of farming practices. Farmers need information to make the right decisions. But many farmers normally lack the information they need to improve their farming.

Q. How is Question Box helping farmers to access information they need in ways different than what is currently being done?

In our experience, farmers in most developing countries lack literacy skills. Extension workers through which most farmers are supposed to receive information and guidance on farming are few, and it is very expensive to provide agriculture extension workers for every village. Some programs have focused on providing information to farmers in ways that require reading, including information provided on the internet. But the majority of farmers are only comfortable with talking and listening. So instead of teaching farmers to read and write in order to benefit from the wealth of information available and accessible through the internet, we said why can’t we enable farmers to access information they need, through talking and listening. With the advent of mobiles phones which are widespread in much of developing countries like Uganda, it is now possible to reach many farmers with the specific information they need.

Q. What technologies were there that Question Box is building on to help farmers access information they need to improve their agriculture?

There are a number of them. Internet sites providing updates and information for particular farmers. There is Google SMS, where farmers can sms a question and get back an answer of the best guess the search engine generates. In India, there are ICT centers where farmers can leave a video question and come back later to get a video answer to their questions. There are quite a number of ICT led initiatives targeted at farmers.

Q. So why then is Question Box important if other technologies are already helping avail relevant information to farmers?

Our observation is that the internet has brought so much information and opportunities for sharing information to the world, but still the world’s four (4) billion people who have never been online are not accessing this wealth of information. They have no access to the internet and might not have access since most of the adults undertaking farming find it hard to learn new things. So why not bring the internet to the farmers through the mobiles phone which is already easily accessible. Researchers have shown that there is a mobile phone in every village, and everyone has a friend or relative with a mobile phone, or at least they know someone with a mobile phone who can help a farmer to use the phone to ask a question and get an answer.

Because of low population density in Uganda’s villages to optimally use Question Boxes, we decided to use mobile phones though Grameen Foundation’s Applab community knowledge workers who are trained and equipped with mobile phones, they are sent to the communities and they go around so that local farmers can ask questions to our operating centre where our staff search for answers from our online database and relay back the information to the farmer. In Uganda, this is currently being done in Mbale and Bushenyi as a pilot.

Q. What inspired you to start Question Box?

Question Box as a technology and initiative is very flexible, allowing farmers to get information they need. Farmers ask and get information they need. It is important to have a gadget or system out there where people can ask and get the important information they need. For me, it is bringing the promise of the internet closer to the poorest people, by letting them also get the information that they need when they need it.

Q. What kind of questions do people ask when they call in?

Banana wilt disease, best ways to plant coffee, cattle and animal diseases, planting practices and many questions, some not related to farming. One important lesson we have learned is that there is a great need for health care information. Many people call in and ask health-related questions, but we don’t have funding for a health care expert. Because the way we work is that we partner with some agricultural experts, who are on call to answer some of the questions asked by farmers. In Uganda, we are working the National Agriculture Research Organization. In case we don’t have the information the farmer wants in the database, we send the question to the agriculture expert in that field, who answers back in at most a day and we relay the answer to the farmer. We also add such new information to our database so that other farmers can access it if they need it.

We are hoping some stakeholders in healthcare can join us in this initiative so that we provide both agriculture and healthcare information. We know from the pilot that if you care about farmers, you have to care about their health. Health has a lot of implications for farming to succeed. When they get sick, farmers cannot farm. A lot of farmers also spend scarce money on treatment they are not sure about.

Q. What in your experience are the most types of information that farmers want?

Farmers mostly want to know about market prices and extension experts’ help. Question Box wants to help as many farmers access this information without expecting extension workers to visit every village. Farmers are able to access the information they need quicker and at less cost. This is about being practical to the realities on the ground. If you want farmers to access any information today, the best choice is to talk to them on the phone.

Q. What role does information play agricultural development and ensuring food security?

Anything that helps farmers safeguard their crops will promote yields and help food security. Even though pesticides or technologies might exist, timely information is an important step to secure crops from diseases; knowing the best market for one’s produce is important to the farmer earning income. Information is very important to successful farming.

Q. So where do you think Question Box will be in the long term, in terms of helping farmers?

It depends on the help and partnerships we get. Our pilot projects in India and Uganda have demonstrated that Question Box does increase access to information that farmers want, and not what you think they want. Farmers normally need information and they need it right away. Many cannot read or write, so sms approaches might not be helpful to all. The farmers need to be enable to call and ask, and they are given the information they want and when they want it. We are currently seeking funding to expand this tool to improve lives of farmers who need information and are currently difficult to access. We are ready to work with all those targeting rural people so that information can reach the rural people in ways that are relevant with their situations. We want to see people enabled to call for free on the Question box or through the mobile phones or community knowledge workers to get answers to their questions.

There are a number of people and projects already collecting information for farmers benefit and we are building on their efforts by making it easy for farmers to get the information.

Q. Any more information on Question Box that you want readers to be aware of?

While this is called Question Box, we have developed a package of of tools beyond the physical Question Box. With the help of Applab, we have developed a software that can help you set up a call center in your office or any location, search you databases and search the internet for any information that is required by the users of the call center. We want to make this software available to whoever wants it by mid-November 2009. It is free source software for anyone in the world. We are looking at integrating sms in the system, but emphasizing calls by farmers to ask the questions for the answers they want. This software and model can work for all types of information by enabling you provide rural people the information that they need. It is better to let every individual ask the information they want instead of always pretending we know what they want.

Software and web-search giant Google last week launched the online Google Trader pilot in Uganda to connect sellers and buyers of goods and services, including in agriculture.

Google Trader online is part of the SMS-based services that the company launched in June in Uganda. The service is aimed at bringing together buyers and sellers of products or services in a “marketplace” using their mobile phones.

Rachel Payne, the manager of Google Uganda, said in a post that Google Trader is a marketplace on the Web for people to search for and trade products and services including agricultural products, cars, jobs, services, electronics or real estate.

SMS helping farmers?

The company launched the Google SMS in partnership with GRAMEEN, MTN and BROSDI, with a promise to provide farmers with the relevant information the farmers need to improve farming and thus get out of poverty.

I’m one of the people who expressed initial doubt over the effectiveness of the Google SMS, not just because most Ugandan farmers cannot read or write (if they have the money to get SMS), but because of the absence of really dependable data and information to answer the wide range of farmers’ queries if they send an SMS to Google.

I have always been concerned about the little attention paid to generation of reliable content which new technologies are targeted to provide to users. Google SMS, though initially free is meant to be paid for by users (subsistence farmers). For me, it would be exploitative to ask farmers to pay to access information they need if you cannot reliably provide the information they need (instead giving them what you have).

It is expected that the online Google Trader is a better platform since it is “free” for those who can freely connect to the internet. But few subsistence farmers in Uganda have that free internet access. The fact that there are 49 online posts for agriculture goods and services over the past two months may concern some people .

That is why, while the online Google Trader offers multiple items at once, and enables users to include photos and more detailed information about the products or services they’re selling or interested in buying, it might also fall short of breaking the barriers (unless more comes from their tech kitchen) that have limited their SMS service from being a real mass information service and a significant contributor to development, especially in agriculture.

While Google should be hailed for extending their important services to Uganda and Africa, the company can do better if it finds ways to ensure their technologies benefit the low income people as well. A local farmer who sends an SMS to Google Trader should get real value for the money invested in the SMS, or the time to go to an internet café.

Google can work with like-minded initiatives like Question Box, Grameen, Yo Uganda and other local software developers to deliver this market (Google Trader) to the majority of Ugandan farmers. Question Box, though in its initial stages has shown that most farmers can be reached through technological devices that allows them to ask and get answered through voice, and for free or less cost through question boxes or toll free call centers that collect, package and process information for different farmers from online sources, their database and experts on call.

In addition, Google can think of working with companies that make mobile phones and those providing telecommunication services to enable voice enabled information request and delivery in languages that farmers in a given area most understand. With Google Translator already doing fairly well for the written word, the world will benefit from work on possibilities of translating voice (audio) if we are to effectively communicate with farmers in Africa.

But content generation and proper archiving is a prerequisite. Google can work with organizations engaged in agriculture to document farmers’ contacts, the crops grown, harvest, prices, specific seed or crop buyers and in what market(s) they operate and uptodate market prices. It is then that we can look forward to a day when a small holder farmer or local trader can SMS to Google’s online database or call in and get the information that is relevant to his or her current need.

Links to related articles

Google Trader Gets A Web-Based Companion In Uganda

Google Trader Extends Service to Web Users

You can also read Gerald Businge’s information and communication blog at www.timelyreflection.com