OR Matthew de Gale SANGONeT Does ICT Strengthen Youth Opportunities in Agriculture? [ ] Do the youth strengthen ICT opportuities in Agriculture? [ ]

Likes to receive info and advertising via SMS Market agent spends >$10 giving market info by voice calls Current record keeping – nowhere for it to go Manage and support complex farmer structures like co-ops Trace the source of produce for health

Who we are… SANGONeT… … is SANGONeT’s small-scale farmers services division. … is a multi-disciplinary team including mobile technologists, software developers, agronomists, business development specialists and development project managers. …has developed competencies in using technology to integrate small-scale farmers into formal value chains and marketing systems, and enabling the management of farmers groups, associations and co-ops. Magrica… …is a non-profit organisation formed 24 years ago to help development organisations use technology effectively …recently convened the ICTs for Rural Development conference bringing together innovative rural technology users from across the continent. …currently running a $3m rollout for the Gates foundation in Kenya and Zambia focussing on building local African capacity to build appropriate solutions

CASE STUDY 1 : East African Lactation Record System A mobile – USSD and.mobi - solution to help small-scale farmers certify and sell cows Improving lactation recording capabilities; farmers can record daily – or sampled – records for their cows – including own-use milk. Self reported data audited and also checked against sold milk data for consistency and credibility Allowing potential buyers the ability to request a lactation history of a cow before purchasing – and by marketing certified cows up for sale via an SMS/web query-able list

Project Hero: Birgen Kipkgosi Recent graduate,developed dairy management system as university project in his home area of Tanykina, with large dairy project, expanded to 22 sites, now implementing mobile and cloud based lactation recording system; highly skilled yet completely trusted by conservative local dairy farmer [ ] Gideon is using his Computer science degree successfully, yet works closely and to the great benefit of his rural, farming home commmunity

Dairy Hero Youngest member of the Okilkei Dairy Management group Only member with a GPRS/web capable phone Become a key leader in group as only member able to backdate recording, look up reports and charts. Has become de facto new office bearer in group “information officer” [ ] Our lactation record-keeping project uses USSD and SMS involve the largest number of people, but its not sustainable with the predominantly younger farmers using web-based app

LimaLinks: Zambian Market Information Service Extension officers able to scale matchmaking activities between farmers and markets Agents able to: better manage supply through insight into 'linked' farmer plantings reduce communications costs (currently > $10/day) responding to farmers scale number of relationship with farmers Agent Costs -200% Farmer Price Achieved +30% Farmers able to: get real-time market data relevant to their nearby markets aggregate produce and share transport “Peer-to-peer” market information service that bypasses need for centralized and formal data- capture []

Elijah Chewe: Youngest Market Agent at Kabwe market. Chosen as one of the pilot testers of our Limalinks application; by far the most active recorder of transactions, has trained 5 other agents, and registered the most number of farmers. [ ] LimaLinks Hero Younger agents have given us the initial momentum, and have gained most in terms of farmer sign-up incentives and farmer-agent matchmaking drives

HouseHold Survey hero Leah Chisimba, 24, led subgroups of enumerators as team leaders after just 2 day training on using tablets [ ] Younger enumerators were 50% faster using tablets than paper; for >30 enumerators, the improvement was less than 20%. Guess who we’ll hire next time…

Does ICT Strengthen Youth Opportunities Skills If you’ve used Facebook on your phone you can use use our mobile apps; if you’ve never used your phone for anything othe rthan making calls, you need an extra day of training If you are the source of reliable information in your farmer group, your status increases; Status New roles and jobs in the Ag value chain increasingly incorporate ICT info in those roles; when we have appointed people in these (QA staff etc) they have invariably been younger people Jobs/Roles Using technology as a component in agriculture slowly removes some of young peoples preconception that agriculture is aold-fashioned; Interest

Contact SANGONeT P O Box 31392, 2017, Braamfontein tel: fax: website: