GFM: The Google award-winning tech solution for African farmers
Africa is the breadbasket of the world, but much of its agricultural value chain management and financing are still paper-based, inefficient and opaque. This needed to change.
Creating online technologies for this market comes with its own challenges.
Users, and in particular those in rural areas, often struggle with poor network coverage and high data costs, older generation devices with ailing battery life, unreliable access to electricity to charge up, and other complexities that make it hard to close the digital divide.
Luckily, when GFM came to IO for help, the IO team already had a ton of experience developing technologies that solved such problems in emerging markets.
Realising that GFM needed a solution that was light on data and battery usage, coupled with offline functionality to circumvent the lack of cell coverage in remote areas, it became clear that a progressive web app (PWA) was the ideal solution.
The Power of PWA
This marvel of web development works in the browser but acts like a native app. It can be used offline when there is no network coverage, but once the user is online again it will automatically sync all the data they gathered to the cloud.
The GFM PWA does all of this and more. Today it is an award-winning technology solution that operates in three countries and manages over 5 000 smallholder farmers, across commodities such as chilli, soy, sorghum and maize.
Progressive web app features include:
- Behaves like a native app
- Push notifications enabled
- Cached content
- No connection needed
- Installable
The final product we delivered to GFM is an acclaimed PWA that:
- Is light on battery-life and data
- Enables quick and reliable offline data capturing
- Automatically and seamlessly syncs data to the cloud
- Makes it easy for field extension officers (FEOs) to work in real-
time from any location and report back on their work as well as log
their GPS coordinates and upload photos - Provides more accurate business intelligence to third-parties
- Promotes transparency and accountability within the agricultural
network
Visit greenfingersmobile.com to learn more.
