GFRAS - NOTE 17: mExtension – Mobile Phones for Agricultural Advisory Services

For example

NOTE 16: Web Portals for Agricultural Extension and Advisory Services

webportals s

Agriculture is the largest employer in the world, providing livelihoods for the majority of the world’s poorest people. As the backbone of many developing country economies, agricultural development becomes synonymous with global development. Research and development efforts to improve agriculture have been ongoing for nearly a century, but with new and ever-changing global challenges, agriculturists need to be equipped with the right information to tackle those challenges. Through advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs), most of the information needed is available on the internet. But the sheer volume and uncertainty about accuracy makes getting correct and credible information very difficult. Web portals aim to resolve this situation. They are specially designed single access points to information collected from diverse sources.

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Introduction

mExtension 1

In the last few decades, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have provided immense opportunities for the social and economic development of rural people, and some technologies have surpassed others. Mobile telephony is one such technology that has developed significantly in the past few years, and the subscription rate in developing countries has gone up from 22 per 100 inhabitants in 2005 to 91.8 per 100 inhabitants in 2015. Mobile technology goes beyond geographic, socio-economic, and cultural barriers and this large increase in mobile subscriptions, along with the recent roll out of 3G and 4G technology, can play a big role in the development of rural people. Mobile phones are devices that can create, store, access, and share information anytime, anywhere. But they are more than that. When teamed with extension and advisory services, they can help improve the livelihoods of rural people by getting much needed timely information to their fingertips at potentially low cost. So-called mobile-based extension and advisory services (mExtension, see Box 1) enable value-added services, such as mobile agro-services and machine to machine services, (1)

which help farmers monitor their crops and farm machinery through mobile phones. While value-added services are generally fairly accessible to all the farmers in rural areas, machine-to-machine services are more cost intensive and require infrastructure that is often not present in developing countries.