Making the marketplace mobile

Through web pages and text messages TradeNet allows rural farmers to advertise their merchandise to an international market and find the fairest price for their crops.

Many first time visitors to Africa are surprised to see so many mobile phones, especially in rural areas. Even in the smallest villages they see numerous advertisements from mobile operators posted on trees, and villagers spending their hard earned money on phone credit. Estimates suggest that by 2010, half of Africa’s population will own mobile phones and more than 90% of communities will be covered by a signal. The power of those figures cannot be underestimated. But the big question remains: how can this access be a successful channel for delivering key information to a population whose main source of income is agriculture?

Study upon study reveals that access to good market information can increase revenues for everyone along the supply chain – producers, collectors, traders, transporters and exporters. Until now, it has been difficult and expensive to develop an affordable and efficient way to both collect and distribute relevant market information. The advancement of mobile networks in Africa has changed that, and systems are already in place that will help rural farmers get better, fairer prices for their efforts.

TradeNet began in 2004 as one of several software projects undertaken by Ghanaian software company, BusyLab. Based in Accra, BusyLab is a private research and development company that is focused on using web and mobile applications to promote economic development in Africa. Already a successful entrepreneur, Mark Davies set up the company to attract the brightest young developers in Ghana to start building innovative products.

The initial idea was to build a simple software program that people working on agricultural projects could lease and use to collect price information which would then be redistributed using SMS and email. Since then, TradeNet’s software has been used by various partners who have helped the team learn about the realities and opportunities in the field.

A great deal

Anyone in the world can visit the TradeNet website and search through more than 7,000 contacts, hundreds of groups and up-to-date offers to buy and sell from all over Africa. 800,000 prices from hundreds of markets, spanning a range of times and countries are available to search and compare over time, and across markets and countries. There are also searchable news and library sections.

Registering on TradeNet is free. Once registered, users are given a personal profile page that can be configured to suit their own tastes and purposes. They can upload offers to buy and sell into the system, and any content they submit using a mobile phone is posted directly to their own website and is displayed for any visitor to see.

Because only a small percentage of its users will be active on the internet, TradeNet is an SMS service at its core. Users can

• sign up to receive weekly automatic SMS alerts on certain commodities in particular markets;
• upload offers to buy and sell products via mobile phone;
• request current prices for a commodity in a country and receive an SMS with the information.

Anyone registered with TradeNet can text information to the website using a set of codes. Here’s how it works: A farmer in northern Ghana is selling 20 tonnes of millet. The farmer texts in SELL MILO 20MT to TradeNet’s international number, and that information is processed by the software and immediately published on the website. The same details are also redistributed to every other user that has signed up to receive alerts on millet sales in Ghana.

TradeNet has also recently developed a downloadable java application that allows anyone to easily navigate through a set of menus to upload or request prices and offers from a mobile phone without having to compose complicated codes. While users might need support to download the application, it will be much easier to navigate.

So far, the SMS response costs have been subsidized by partners. In the future, under a new franchise model currently under development, businesses will be able to charge subscription fees for the service.

Associations, cooperatives and businesses can also create a free group website to advertise their goods, while larger groups can pay for extra services. For example, an organized cooperative can send the SMS message of their choice to any or all of their members in seconds. Groups using the service have used this function to send out information on prices, offers, transport, weather, and best practices to their members’ mobile phones, thus, saving time and money on transportation and phone bills.

Another subscription level gives the group the ability to use TradeNet’s supply chain tools, where an association or business can identify the farmers and the commodities that their group is interested in and set up a checklist of harvest activities to track. Farm leaders then text in activities, and any activities that miss deadlines can get SMS reminders, helping group hosts to track crop activities and predict yields. These supply chain tools have been created in an effort to make the markets more dependable and accessible to local buyers and exporters.

Increasing support

Larger traders have been the early individual adopters of TradeNet, and throughout West Africa there have been success stories of traders finding larger markets, better deals and truly taking advantage of the connections that can be made with this new technology. Generally, larger traders have been more able to adopt the technology because of their access, their higher education levels and the sheer capital they have to make deals with new buyers and sellers without having to work on a credit basis.

One of those traders is Issa Keita of Bamako, Mali, who has said that before TradeNet, he often received inquiries about his commodities, but found that few people were able to come up with the capital to follow through with a deal. With TradeNet, he found able buyers in West Africa and Europe responding to the offers he posted.

When it comes to reaching small-scale producers, the challenges of access and literacy remain substantial. With experience gained by partners and pilot projects run by TradeNet in Ghana, it has become clear that strong distribution networks are needed to deliver relevant information to everyone along the supply chain, especially rural farmers. This means creating networks to upload the data and training village operators to provide support. Without this local support, it is not clear that small-scale producers will adopt TradeNet and actually receive the information they need to make better business decisions or increase their revenues, as Issa and other traders have done.

With its partners, TradeNet has plans to create such networks and try to reach everyone along the supply chain, no matter how remote they are, with relevant market information delivered via mobile phones. If deployed properly, millions of people who depend on agriculture as their main source of income could be receiving SMS messages that can help them do better business and get a fairer deal. A decade ago, distribution of information at such a scale in the developing world would have seemed impossible. But today it is right at our fingertips.

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Sarah Bartlett is the communications director of BusyLab, developers of TradeNet.