3 Million Farmers Use Mobile Phone for Agriculture Info

Ethiopia has one of the most extensive agriculture extension systems in the world. Nearly 85 percent of the population work the land for a living, and a multilingual mobile phone-based resource centre has turned into a popular source of information for farmers.

The hotline, operated by the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research, and Ethio Telecom, and created by the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA), has proved a huge hit. Since its July 2014 launch and still in its pilot phase, more than three million farmers in the regions of Amhara, Oromia, Tigray and the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region (SNNPR) have punched 8028 on their mobile phones to access the system, which uses both interactive voice response (IVR) and SMS technology.

“The service receives approximately 225 new calls and 1,375 return calls per hour into the system,” Elias Nure, the information communication technology project leader at ATA, told IRIN. When the number of lines doubles from the current 90, he said, “these numbers should significantly increase.”

More than 70 percent of users are smallholder farmers, he said.

Poor infrastructure and low access to credit and markets have contributed to low crop yields since the 1960s. More and more, detailed and speedily-delivered information is recognized as an essential part of bringing agricultural production levels closer to their full potential.

Ethiopia’s immense agriculture extension network has led to the establishment of 10,000 Farmer Training Centres, and trained at least 63,000 field extension workers, also known as development agents. However, the reliance on development agents means that sometimes agronomic information reaches farmers too late or is distorted.

By harnessing mobile phone technology, Farmers can search for practical advice, while customized content can be broadcast through text messaging and other services, during pest and disease outbreaks, to different callers based on the crop, or geographic or demographic data captured when farmers first registered with the system. Recently, the service warned registered farmers about the threat posed by wheat stem rust.

“These alerts and notifications were not available to smallholder farmers in the past and could greatly benefit users of the system by getting access to warnings in real-time,” said ATA’s Elias.

The hotline currently focuses on cereal crops such as barley, maize, teff, sorghum and wheat, but plans are under way to provide agricultural advice on other crops, such as sesame, chickpea, haricot beans and cotton, while incorporating farmers’ feedback on needs

Given the dozens of languages spoken, targeted information remains important, though the system is only operating in some half dozen of the more than 60 regions in Ethiopia at this point. The Economist reported last year that Ethiopia lags behind its neighbors in terms of cell phone penetration; only 25 percent of its 90 million people use cell phones compared with the regional average of 70 percent.

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