At the press of a phone key, farmers will now be able to know commodity prices ... by Angella Nabwowe
Rural farmers from the Lango sub-region in northern Uganda have learnt how to use mobile phone Short Message Service (SMS) to get prices of agricultural produce, seeds and markets.The service, so far restricted to MTN Uganda mobile telephone subscribers enables one to get for instance price information by selecting MTN services, then commodity prices, and selecting the name of the produce from the menu.
Alternatively one can type the name of the commodity and send to 8198.This was during a Lango Forum on e-agriculture about sensitizing rural women farmers and the community about the role of Information Communication Technology (ICT) in agriculture and rural development. The forum was organized by Kubere Information Centre (KIC) and Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET), with support of the Technical Centre for Agriculture and Rural Cooperation ACP-EU (CTA) and Hivos. The forum took place at Omondi Hostel, Apac district, on July 31, 2008.Facilitating a session on the use of SMS in disseminating agriculture information, Tom Ogutu, of CESVI –FAO, an Italian NGO, took farmers through a practical exercise and they got prices about simsim(sesame) across the country using sms. “Let’s make the best use of our phones at home. This is much easier and cheaper than taking a bus to Kampala to look for information and markets,” said Ogutu.
Besides the practical exercises about SMS, the over 70 farmers, drawn from Apac, Gulu, Oyam and Lira districts learnt how to network and share information for development purposes. Officially opening the forum, the Apac Resident District Commissioner (RDC),Alex Jura noted that there is a huge information gap at the grassroots level which is putting a burden on government and other implementers of development programmes. H e noted that the challenges that rural women face are enormous because of lack of information. He said conmen defraud rural women in the name of assessing government programmes like Plan for Modernization of Agriculture(PMA), National Agriculture Advisory Services (NAADS) and the Livestock Restocking Programme. “That can only stop if we take seriously information sharing such that we make it difficult for fraudsters to confuse rural women.”Speaking at the same forum, the Apac district speaker, Wacio Dickens lamented how ginners cheated cotton farmers in 2006 and offered them a farm gate price of 350 shillings per kilogram and after a short while, world cotton prices skyrocketed. “If farmers had information about prices, they would have waited. They got so discouraged and we told them to plant alternative crops. From 2006 to date, cotton production has reduced considerably,” said Wacio.He made a passionate appeal to stakeholders to increase ICT budgets saying Apac district council allocated only UGS 3.7 million to the sector out of the UGS 3billion budget for the financial year 2008/2009.
Though participants appreciated the role ICTs in agriculture and rural development, there was consensus that ICTs alone will not fight poverty and underscored the need to develop other infrastructure like the road network.The RDC asked the organizers of the forum to push for technology which is user friendly.
