Malawi urged to enhance SMS technology for agriculture

Technology for Extension to Smallholders (Texts) project has asked government to ensure providing adequate resources towards enhancing mobile phone technology among smallholder farmers.

The project believes enhancing mobile technology among farmers has potential of improving agricultural development in Malawi.

Texts chief of party Rachael Sibande said this in Lilongwe recently during a meeting aimed at sharing experiences, lessons learned and map the way forward on the Texts project which phases out on Thursday

Sibande said in the past 18 months, ICT has taken new strides in complementing extension service delivery to over 400 000 smallholder farmers across the country due to Texts project.

“This has taken us as a project to all but one of the 28 districts of the country, except for the beautiful Island of Likoma. Our staff went out to train over 2 000 government extension agents on the concept of sms extension, how to interpret messages and how to train farmers on the same,” she said.

She said the extension agents went out and trained over 23 000 lead farmers who in turn reached out to over 460 000 smallholders that are currently benefiting from these messages through their lead farmers.

According to Sibande, it is a pathetic to realise that majority of the field workforce, who are women do not have access to cellphones and radios where most extension messages were delivered by the project.

Sibande explained that the value of mobile technology in reaching out to smallholders cannot be underestimated at a time when mobile penetration rates are as high as 60 percent in Africa.

With funding from the Flanders International Cooperation Agency (Fica), Agribusiness Systems International (ASI) implemented the Texts project with a goal of supporting the department of agricultural extension services (Daes) to extend its outreach through use of sms extension as a complimentary means of delivering extension services to smallholders.

Currently, ASI is conducting an evaluation of the Texts project to establish the adoption of sms extension by extension agents and smallholders and the results will be shared soon.