Issue 50: Special 50th issue

Finding the right balance

Tidiane Seck

The farming world will only have a future if it can strike the right balance between the technical decisions farmers make and the management of energy supply.

From your own experience, have you seen how ICTs can improve farmers’ livelihoods?
ICTs are not yet in general use in Senegal. We aim to get to that stage by the end of 2010, through the National Local Development Programme (PNDL) and a range of partnerships supported by the State Agency for Information Technology (ADIE). As for the farming community in particular, we know how vital it is for farmers’ to have market information.

With ‘time-to-market’ (T2M), an innovative system developed by Manobi, farmers can get the prices of produce from the markets in Dakar sent directly to their mobile phones. Manobi agents gather and post the prices. Any middleman who goes to the countryside for supplies for the markets will now be dealing with a farmer who has up-to-date information and is in a strong position to negotiate.

If the producers feel they are being cheated, they can always deliver their produce to the markets themselves. This system, which can be directly accessed by farmers, enables them to increase their earnings. Unfortunately, it is limited to certain geographical areas and to two modes of production only: market gardening and fisheries.

The introduction of ICTs affects other sectors too: education, registration of births and deaths, land measurement, but above all health and good governance, and we have a key partnership in these two areas with UNDP, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and Dakar University.

In the past ten years there has been a rapid expansion in the use of mobile phones. Why do you think have they proved such a success in Africa?
Because they meet people’s needs so well. Africans don’t write, they talk. And they like to communicate. And mobiles offer a way of solving various economic problems such as travel and transport, information and trade. So much is done on mobiles these days. This is why Africa has such a high rate of market penetration for mobiles, at 50% (the same as for Europe, taking all the European countries together). I think it will be up to 80% in two or three years.

Every day the devices get smaller, less expensive and more easily available. How has this phenomenon affected the ICT policies of African governments?
It has had very little effect, because the devices are still relatively expensive. What we are seeing instead is an increasing tendency to use second-hand devices, which are arriving in containers and are used to equip public offices, as well as serving the public at large and the education sector. That raises two problems. First, these devices tend to wear out quickly or become obsolete. Second, there is the question of how to dispose of the worn out devices, which we are not really in a position to do.
Given the current world crises (in food, oil supplies, etc.) and the instability in many ACP countries, the priorities are still health, education and agriculture, much more than advanced technology. In spite of all that, a great deal of effort is being put in to improving the situation, and hopes are high. In all our countries, access to the internet is becoming increasingly desirable, and almost everybody now has a mobile phone.

Does this give rural people access to more information, or is it just that they have more ways of accessing the same information?
They do have access to more information. In Senegal, the Ministry of Telecommunications and Information Technology has opened ‘community multimedia centres’ in rural areas. These centres act as a kind of rural cybercafé, where people can access national and international news and also listen to community radio stations which only broadcast local news. These are extra media resources, in addition to the traditional sources of radio and television, which are also available, of course.

How can farmers be sure they are getting good, reliable information?
I don’t think there’s much we can do about this. It’s a problem of global governance of the internet, and that calls for global solutions. Whether you live in town or in the country, the solutions must be the same for everyone, nobody must be hurt or be given special advantage.

What are the factors limiting the expansion of rural ICT programmes?

First of all, the lack of access to sufficient bandwidth. There’s no point having the internet if it takes ages to download anything! Some projects do raise this issue, such as the O3B consortium which, as its name indicates, is aiming to connect the ‘other 3 billion’ by bypassing the usual access providers.

But the question that I think is more fundamental is the impact of ICTs on sustainable management in our countries. I think the farming world will only have a future if it can strike the right balance between the technical decisions farmers make and the management of energy supply.

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