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ECAMIC project - using ICTs innovatively to promote market access for farmers
Challenges:
The Eastern Corridor Agricultural Marketing Information Center (ECAMIC) project is embedded in the broader Eastern Corridor programmed of SEND Ghana. The project uses both low, and relatively high-tech approaches to disseminate of market information to cooperatives of farmers in Salaga, Chamba and Kpandai, along the northeast farming belt in Ghana. Prior to connecting farmers to TradeNet, ECAMIC collates market and other farming information by email at its main offices, which is then disseminated to farmers by SEND's field officers on motorbikes. But this is a slow process. Even if they had the fastest of motorbikes traveling on the best of roads, it will take several days for ECAMIC to reach majority the farmers in the 48 communities. To supplement this, the project experimented with a clever idea of notice boards in farming communities, so that farmers who may not be reached by field agents, will get the price information when posted on the notice boards. However, access to market information improved significantly when SEND facilitated the acquisition of 200 mobile phones for farmers at 60% of the market price. Next, SEND's ECAMIC project signed on as a customer of TradeNet, an agricultural market software developed by a company called BusyLab (www.busylab.com, to provide farmers with accurate and up-to-date crop market information via SMS. ECAMIC then registered the farmers on the TradeNet website (www.tradenet.biz), and set them up for automatic SMS alerts on prices for relevant crops in markets across Ghana. Furthermore, any farmer with access to the latest market information can make it available for everyone in the co-operative through the notice boards. With the capacity building training, farmers are also able to use a set of codes to compose text messages requesting price information, send it to TradeNet, and receive a response in the form of a text message. In other words, access to timely market information is, for the first time, at their fingertips.
To increase accessibility to
To increase accessibility to mobile phones among farmer cooperatives in the Eastern Corridor he ECAMIC project facilitated the procurement of mobile phones for farmers in view of the shift in emphasis from internet based access to SMS via cellular phones. The process would involve the deployment of a total of 200 cellular handsets at subsidized rates to the farmer's cooperatives. Women paid 60% and Men paid 70% of the total cost of a mobile phone. Building the capacity of farmer cooperatives on the use this phones to access market information is key in assuring farmers continuous access to market information after the close of the project. To this effect, series of training has been conducted for farmer cooperatives on the use of mobile phones to facilitate accessing of market information. Farmers now receive text messages on update of market price, request for market prices of commodities form various market centers and send offers to sell their produce. Farmers should be fed of the information about the current update of global market. Checking this into Google Public Data doesn't cost mush for them. This brings out the local affairs in market including the transparency report in agricultural affairs.
improve your short project description
This is a terrific project, and I voted for it, but your short project description really doesn't do it justice. You need a much better two-sentence description of this project in order to be able to "sell" it. I guess I was one of the few people willing to read through the entire description and, in doing so, realized the great potential of this project -- but it took a lot of reading to see the value, and most funders aren't going to read the whole proposal unless there's a better, immediate summary of what this project is going to do.