Kenyan and Zambian Smallholder Farmers' Current
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Real Mobiles: Kenyan and Zambian Smallholder Farmers’ Current Attitudes Towards Mobile Phones Susan P. Wyche Melissa Densmore Brian Samuel Geyer Michigan State University University of Cape Town Michigan State University Department of Media and Information Department of Computer Science Department of Anthropology East Lansing, MI, United States Cape Town, South Africa East Lansing, MI, United States [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT design of mobile phones? There is value in deepening the What are rural farmers in sub-Saharan Africa’s current attitudes community’s understanding of farmers’ mobile phone use towards their mobile phones? We draw from qualitative studies of patterns, so that scholars, practitioners and funding agencies can smallholder farmers in Kenya and Zambia to answer this question. better anticipate how phone-based technologies will be adopted or A review of ongoing efforts to develop mobile phone services for ignored. farmers paired with critiques of the “colonial impulse” embedded This paper provides that understanding. We studied mobile in future-oriented visions of technology use guided our study. Our phones, and their use and non-use, among nearly 200 farmers findings suggest there is a mismatch between the design of mobile living in rural Kenya and Zambia. The qualitative case studies, phone applications and our participants’ perceptions and usage of covering two regions in each country, highlight similarities and their devices. We also discovered several understudied barriers some differences among smallholder farmers’ and their mobile that hinder adoption of mobile services: the influx of counterfeit phone usage practices. Our findings suggest that mobile phones and substandard mobile phones, distrust of the content being are reaching everyone, but are not perceived as tools that support delivered via SMS and reservations about the spiritual and health farming. The influx of counterfeit and sub-standard or “China- consequences accompanying phone use. We use these findings to make” models pose new burdens to farmers and access to useful encourage Information and Communication Technology and agricultural information is inhibited by an overflow of Development (ICTD) researchers and practitioners to re-examine misinformation delivered via SMS. Questions about the spiritual the mobile phone. Specifically, we suggest developing and health consequences of interacting the devices also shaped interventions that teach farmers how to better use phones and participants’ interactions with their phones. present recommendations for improving their design. We use these findings to raise questions about some ICTD General Terms projects’ future-oriented nature of and to encourage the community to improve upon what they built yesterday. In other Design, Human Factors words, building and evaluating novel mobile phone applications Keywords makes invisible the complications smallholder farmers encounter Human-Computer Interaction (HCI); mobile phones; agriculture; when using their existing handsets. Our findings suggest rural; sub-Saharan Africa; qualitative research, postcolonial opportunities to create interventions that teach farmers how to computing operate their mobile phones and highlight improvements that need to be made to existing technologies. More broadly, we 1. INTRODUCTION demonstrate the value in non-needs-based studies of mobile phone Most people in sub-Saharan Africa are farmers with small pieces use and argue that substantial rethinking of these technologies and of land, large families, and poor crop yields, who do not grow the socio-cultural issues surrounding their use is necessary if they excess food to sell at markets. Widespread mobile phone are to benefit smallholder farmers. ownership among this social group means there is an opportunity to provide them with pertinent information that could help them 2. RELATED WORK grow more crops, sell them, and make more money. Despite the 2.1 Prototype Systems for Farmers expanding body of academic and applied research on mobile The explosive growth of mobile phone ownership throughout the phones, the ICTD community still knows little about this largest developing world has motivated academic researchers, technology segment of mobile phone users and their evolving attitudes companies, entrepreneurs, governments and NGOs to both design towards these devices: How do they actually use, or not use, their and evaluate mobile applications that target smallholder farmers. phones to access agricultural information? What types of handsets Notable projects from the ICTD and Human-Computer Interaction do they own? What problems do they face when using them? (HCI) literatures include Avaaj Otalo, an interactive voice-based What can farmers’ experiences tell us about how to improve the service that provides best agricultural practice information to farmers in rural India [41]. VideoKheti also supports knowledge Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for sharing among farmers by allowing them to watch agricultural personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are extension video on mobile devices [14]. KrishiPustak is another not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that prototype application developed to support social networking and copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy information exchange among rural farmers [32]. otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Design and evaluation studies of these and other prototype ICTD ‘15, May 15–18, 2010, Singapore, Singapore. systems are valuable because they demonstrate how new Copyright 2015 ACM 978-1-4503-3163-0/15/05…$15.00 technologies can benefit rural farmers. However, these studies are http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2737856.2738013 less useful for revealing the antecedent conditions necessary for Communication of Hydro-Meteorological Information (RANET) adoption of these services. In other words, asking farmers to project in Zambia. The developers of this application collect interact with a sample system that is unavailable to broader weather data from farmers, then disseminate the information segments of the population provides little insight into how these about extreme weather events and climate change to them [35]. applications might be adopted and typically used, especially M-Kilimo is a “farmer helpline” that also sends customers weekly outside of the study region. These studies all take place with weather forecasts in Swahili [24]. Other mobile applications farmers living in India, where infrastructural factors, such as typically combine weather information with other content, such as access to electricity and road conditions, tend to be more market pricing information; Esoko and the defunct Nokia Life favorable than in rural regions in sub-Saharan Africa [27]. Tools project are examples [16]. Other SMS applications such as, Applications such as VideoKheti are also developed for farmers “The Digital Early Warning Network” (DEWN) in Tanzania, who have access to smartphones that are capable of screening disseminate advice about how to control disease outbreaks to videos. While these models are becoming increasingly common in farmers [39]. sub-Saharan Africa’s urban and peri-urban areas, rural farmers still tend to own basic and non-Internet enabled handsets [13]. 2.2.2 Market Information Systems MIS are another type of SMS service developed for smallholder Our investigations in rural Kenya and Zambia broaden the ICTD farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and other developing regions. MIS community’s geographical and comparative understanding of are typically mobile applications that disseminate market price farmers’ mobile phone usage practices. This knowledge is useful data to farmers. They were created to address information for raising questions about the external validity of prior studies asymmetries between the farmers and traders, who had and for highlighting dissimilarities among smallholder farmers in traditionally been able to take advantage of farmers’ lack of different developing regions. knowledge about the market value of their produce [16]. Popular 2.2 Commercially Available Services examples of MIS include Reuters Market Lite (RML), Esoko (formerly known as TradeNet), M-Farm, Kenyan Agricultural There have been few attempts to develop prototype applications Commodities Exchange (KACE), and Lima Links in Zambia [44]. for Africa’s smallholder farmers; however, commercially available services that target this population abound. These There are virtually no systematic usage studies of farmer advisory applications are primarily short message service (SMS) based and information services, but there is a growing body of literature services. This platform supports sending and receiving brief (160 devoted to evaluating MIS; findings from these studies are mixed characters or less) messages that communicate timely and simple [38]. Fafchamps and Minten studied whether the distribution of information such as weather forecasts or market prices. Using “agricultural information through mobile phones generates SMS to send content also requires less bandwidth than a voice important economic benefits” in rural India, and found access to call, making this platform not only less expensive than calling, but pricing information did not significantly improve farmers’ ability also capable of delivering information to