The new extensionist: Leveraging the ubiquitous presence of mobile phones in Uganda to improve traditional extension systems
Uganda’s economy is heavily dependent on agriculture. The sector employs over 69% of the country’s workforce and contributes approximately 26% to the country’s GDP. Despite the current challenges of climate change, depleting soils due to over-cultivation to feed an ever growing population (Uganda has one of the highest population growth rates in the world at 3.3%) and growing middle class, Ugandan agriculture still has the potential to do well, if the right extension, advisory and business development services are provided to farmers.
Essentially, agricultural extension plays a key role in improving the livelihoods of farmers through providing farming assistance, disseminating information and technologies, as well as translating scientific research into practice. These services are the critical agents of change in transforming subsistence agriculture to modern agriculture, promoting food security, building capacities to adopt resilient farming practices, and fighting poverty.
Across Sub-Saharan African countries including Uganda, agricultural extension models normally adopt a combination of several approaches: supply-driven, demand-driven, and participatory/group based, top-down and multi-stakeholder/value chain ones. To deliver agricultural extension services, extension officers usually visit farmers in different neighborhoods and districts in person. All efforts involve extension officers directly interacting with farmers, an approach that remains very expensive given the large numbers of farmers to reach. For instance, figures from Uganda’s Ministry of Agriculture indicate that the extension officer farmer ratio stood at 1:3,000 back in 2009. This figure has definitely widened after the deprecation of a World Bank supported demand driven extension system — the National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS). Efforts by the government (e.g., the public sector agricultural extension), agricultural nonprofit organizations, and private corporations (e.g., coffee companies) have not met the needs unique groups like women and youth, due to the high costs involved. An inexpensive, time efficient, farmer responsive extension and advisory is needed.
The advent of ICTs, especially mobile technologies, and their rapid diffusion in Uganda if well leveraged, can bring about major quantum jumps in efficiency, effectiveness, and responsiveness of the existing agricultural extension systems. There is certainly potential for significant and rapid gains in the diffusion and adoption of improved farming techniques by integrating effective ICT systems in the existing extension system.
My name is Daniel Ninsiima. I’m the founder and CEO of m-omulimisa. m-Omulimisa (www.m-omulimisa.com) is a mobile and web-based platform that enables farmers to exchange information with extension officers in their local languages for free. The platform leverages human mediation and text messaging to create a mobile and web-based consultation space. The system leverages the ubiquitous presence of mobile phones to improve farmers’ access to extension services as well as improve the efficiency and effectiveness of extension services. Farmers use their phones to ask questions in languages they understand, and receive understandable feedback from extension officers in the region via text messages. The use of local languages makes the platform highly compatible with Uganda’s heterogeneous lingual landscape of over 46 indigenous languages.
I’m profoundly honored to have been selected as one the rigorously selected 1,000 global talents for this year’s Innovation Lab in Copenhagen, Denmark. I look forward to meeting like-minded innovators and exploring solutions to solve to the World’s most pressing problems.
