SMS

This joint effort draws on the wealth of existing expertise across numerous organizations and previous research to codify a series of best conduct practices for the use of SMS in disaster response. This guideline document is a collaborative work in progress and therefore neither fully comprehensive nor entirely complete. This effort focuses exclusively on “natural” disasters and thus currently excludes reference to political crises and complex humanitarian emergencies.

The objective of this study is to provide an overview of the current trend in m-Agri Apps development and to answer the question of how to improve information provisioning to smallholder farmers. It also aims to translate this knowledge into success factors, weaknesses, and opportunities for global cooperation and explore ways to share expertise on entrepreneurship in the domain of agro, food and ICT, and to identify possibilities to catalyse the development of mobile applications in smallholder agriculture.

To successfully use mobile phones to aid development efforts, understanding the impact of the social structure on mobile phone adoption, uses, perceived impacts, and reinvention of uses is invaluable. Interviews were conducted with 90 mobile phone-owning holders of small- to medium-sized farms—50 women and 40 men—actively involved in agricultural development-based farm groups in Kamuli District, Uganda. Respondents indicated use of the mobile phone for coordinating access to agricultural inputs, market information, to monitor ªnancial transactions, and to consult with agricultural experts.

This report analysis the status of mobile technology in the world, acknowledging that despite the growth and increasing pervasiveness of mobile networks over the last decade, there is still a section of the population with minimal or no coverage. There have also been experimentswith alternative connectivity technologies backed and promoted by big internet players.

This study was developed to assist development practitioners in assessment and selection of information and communication technology (ICT) applications for monitoring and evaluation in rural projects, specifically in agriculture and forestry, with an emphasis on mobile technology for data collection. Particularly in highly decentralized projects, data collection can be challenging, and the large number of options and specific project needs makes selecting technology a challenge.

Access to reliable, timely and relevant information can help significantly and in many ways to reduce farmers’ risk and uncertainty, empowering them to make good decisions. However, whether or not this access leads to impact often depends on issues related to markets, institutions, policies and resource availability.

Delivering mobile-enabled agricultural services (‘mAgri services’) to women in developing countries is a major market opportunity for the mobile industry that also offers substantial social benefits. The mAgri services market is nascent but growing—GSMA has tracked 106 active, global deployments by mobile network operators (MNOs) and third party providers. Women working in agriculture account for an estimated 556 million potential users globally, but are underserved as a unique customer segment.

Mobile financial services (MFS) are emerging rapidly in the developing world, with over 150 mobile money deployments live and over 110 more planned worldwide at present. Markets such as Tanzania, Bangladesh and Pakistan are realizing success and are potentially able to replicate the widespread adoption of Safaricom’s M-PESA service in Kenya. Others are still works-in-progress, finding mass adoption and scale elusive.