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.

Africa Reporting Project correspondent Madeleine Bair published a story this week in the East Bay Express about economist Ted Miguel’s research on climate change and civil conflict in Africa. The study, produced by Miguel and a UC Berkeley doctoral student, is the first to link global warming to human warfare.

But the lack of attendance by all G8 country leaders – except Italy, where the three-day summit was held – did not bode well for increasing investment, donations and food aid to where they are needed most.

“I would have liked all countries to be represented by their heads of state or government,” Diouf said, as cameras flashed and reporters scribbled notes, held up microphones and sent text messages. “The funding of agriculture isn’t decided by ministries of agriculture.”

Diouf also expressed frustration that the summit declaration, the product of several round-table discussions and meetings attended by 60 heads of state and more than 2,000 delegates, did not list specific target dates or financial sums for dealing with the increasing number of hungry people in the world.

The declaration did reaffirm the delegates’ commitment to the already-agreed-upon Millenium Development Goal of halving the world’s hungry population by 2015.

International humanitarian organizations Oxfam and ActionAid were quick to release statements condemning the lack of commitment or substantial accomplishments achieved during the summit.

“The World Food Summit failed to make any major breakthroughs. And the G8 leaders didn’t even bother turning up,” said Adriana Campolina, ActionAid regional director for Latin America. “Warm words don’t fill empty stomachs.”

Alternating between French and English during the final press conference, Diouf stressed the importance of looking at long-term structural factors when dealing with food insecurity. Some of the factors included foreign direct investment, technology and climate change.

The summit declaration also called for more attention to climate change, requesting that countries “proactively….increase the resilience of agricultural producers to climate change, with particular attention to small agricultural producers and vulnerable populations.”

Diouf called Sub-Saharan Africa a challenge and said that it was a “great human tragedy” that this region housed the largest percentage of hungry people in the world.

Climate change, he said, made it even more difficult to find solutions to food insecurity, specifically noting the drought in the Horn of Africa and its effect on Djibouti, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya and other countries.

When asked what aspect of food insecurity he would want to focus on in Africa, Diouf chose water as a top priority. He called increasing small-scale irrigation projects, controlling water-sheds and freeing up funds for water projects vital to the future of agriculture on the continent.

In conclusion, Diouf appealed to the media to make “an important effort” to bring attention to the more than 1 billion hungry members of the population, warning that otherwise, the world may “forget completely.”

Day 3, 5:28 p.m.: While there were plenty of critics who called the U.N. World Summit on Food Security fruitless, not everyone felt the conference was a failure, as some have described it.

We had the privilege of sharing a press table with Fath el-Rahman al-Gadi, a Sudanese journalist who, after filing his own reports for the newspaper he represented, shared his thoughts with me on the conference.

After one of my colleagues showed him our site and helped him with a minor computer glitch, I asked him for his initial thoughts. He said the efforts by the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Program, and private and civil society organizations set a “new trend in humanity” for fighting hunger.

Al-Gadi said he had one disappointment, however. Although delegates from 192 countries were represented at the conference, he said, only one country from the Group of Eight–Italy, the host country–was present.

“We felt sorry for that,” he said, “because we would have liked to witness the active presence of the European countries as well as the U.S. of A.”

“With south-to-north collaborations we can build a future,” he added. “Of course, the rich countries can make a significant contribution through funding and through the transferring of technology know-how. But I hope that in the future this trend of absenteeism will no longer exist.”

I also asked al-Gadi to describe what he felt was the most important food security story in Sudan right now. At the moment, he said, the focus is on the country’s rich natural resources, especially those related to land, water and soil. With these resources, he said, Sudan has the potential to compete in world markets provided that the projects concerning food insecurity are sponsored by collaborative efforts between Sudan and the international communities.

Check back later for more updates from Shalwah and Alexia on the final moments of the conference.

–Martin Ricard

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

By STEFANO VALENTINO

The motto “Eat Locally Grown Food” echoed by the California-based foodie movement could help solve the food crisis in Africa. One of those who advocates this theory is Michael Pollan, celebrated best-selling food writer and professor at the School of Journalism in Berkeley. What do organic fans in the Bay Area have to do with people starving miles away across the ocean? To understand this bizarre relationship, let’s talk about rice. The Department of Agriculture forecasts rice production in California will reach the record peak of 2.3 million tons by the end of the year (8 percent more than in 2008). Only Arkansas will do better. Multiply that figure by 100 and you will have the number of Africans in the sub-Sahara region that the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) still considers chronically hungry: roughly 230 million!

Philanthropists may think that shipping overseas the abundant Californian rice, the most subsidized in 2007 (see the Farm Subsidy Database), could save those souls from starvation. That’s a good example of how the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Why? The funny answer would be that Californian short-grain rice does not fit sub-Saharan long-grain diet. The serious one is that subsidized food aid, far from being a remedy, actually contributes to the global food crisis. Heavily supported by public money, U.S. rice (together with corn) has been over-produced and largely exported to Africa below market price over the last decade — a great deal for poor people who could rely on foreign cheap food instead of having to produce their own. But such a deal didn’t last long. In 2008 world prices skyrocketed and so did the number of empty stomachs. That brings us straight to the point: Unlike what the consumerist propaganda says, the current food crisis is not a matter of lack of food. It is a matter of subsidized food.

Pollan explains how U.S. subsidies have become the worst enemy of African food security. “The Farm Bill, passed in 2007, allows our farmers to sell on the world market below the world price, thus making it harder for African farmers to compete in the production of essential crops for their livelihood, such as soy, cotton, corn”, the author of The Onnivore’s Dilemma argues. “This indirectly applies also to the corn-fed chicken that the U.S. sells to Africa for a cheap price.” Poor countries have asked in vain the international institutions to outlaw these subsidies which are illegal under WTO rules. “Most of the Americans mistakenly think that the cheaper the food is, the better it is because it helps feed the world. They don’t understand that dumping commodities on world markets is not the right way and that their taxes are, indeed, making the poor even more hungry: Producing a lot of food is useless when people do not have money to buy it”, Pollan says.

The big lesson drawn from the rise of food prices which has been striking the world since last year is that relying on imports is dangerous and that each country should produce its own food. What’s happened exactly? According to the journalism professor at Berkeley, “When world prices were low, African farmers could not produce enough food to meet their domestic demand because the World Bank-led reforms had deprived them of the subsidies they used to receive from their governments while the U.S. was still subsidizing its own farmers. So when prices went up and people could no longer afford imported grains, the local production was insufficient to feed them all.” Pollan calls for policies that help smallholder farmers grow for local markets, thus enabling developing countries to have some control over their food destiny, even if that means protecting their markets and supporting their farmers — something the U.S. is very good at. “Westerners like to pretend they are independent, self-made, autonomous, but usually you find a government helping hand behind much of their success”, Pollan points out. “It’s important to understand that some farmers in California do receive subsidies — rice and cotton growers in particular — and most of them benefit from other forms of federal help, such as cheap water, interstate highways, etc. Californian farmers shouldn’t flatter their independence too much.”

The foodie movement, of which Pollan is the unrivalled guru, doesn’t ask for the suppression of subsidies but for their conversion into new forms of incentives encouraging farmers to preserve the land, reduce pollution and invest in food quality rather than food quantity. “I’m not against supporting farmers. To the contrary, eliminating farm support and subsidies is not the answer”, the Berkeley-based organic food paladin concludes. “What we need to do is create incentives through those programs so that farmers produce the kind of food we need. The challenge is to align our farm policies with our health, environmental and global food access goals.”