Eleven Berkeley students traveled to Africa during summer 2009 to conduct research into the use of information & communication technologies (ICT) to improve smallholder agriculture. The project was sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and led by I School assistant professor Tapan Parikh, dean AnnaLee Saxenian, and George Scharffenberger, the Special Assistant to the Vice Chancellor for Research for International Development.
Two-thirds of the population of sub-Saharan Africa works in agriculture, mainly as smallholder farmers. Self-employment in agriculture is by far the dominant activity for the rural labor force, particularly for women. In these region, the rural poverty rate exceeds 80 percent, and the number of poor is still rising.
The project aims to identify high-impact ways that ICT can improve African farmers' livelihoods.
I School students Michael Manoochehri and Becky Hurwitz traveled to Uganda, along with Charlene Chen, an MBA student in Berkeley's Haas School of Business. I School student Sarah Van Wart was in Ethiopia, along with Stefan Jacob and Benoit Bouvard, also Haas MBA students. Students Joshua Blumenstock, Deepti Chittamuru, Neha Kumar, Neil Patel, and Kuang Chen conducted related research in various locations in Africa and India.
Being on the ground in Africa gave the student researchers a new first-hand understanding of some of the infrastructure challenges. The Ethiopia team struggled with sporadic electricity, non-responsive cell-phone networks, intermittent SMS (text message) connectivity, and a national data network that was extremely slow when it worked at all. The network problems prevented the researchers from updating their team's blog, and gave them a new-found appreciation for challenges of technology-based tools for farmers.
In Africa, the research teams focused on needs analysis, examining dozens of case studies of different approaches to agricultural development; they visited and interviewed representatives from government agricultural agencies, Western development efforts, farmers' unions and cooperatives, agricultural training and educational programs, micro-finance programs, and others. By looking at different approaches and their outcomes, the student researchers attempted to identify common challenges and best-practices, figure out which pieces of the puzzle are missing, and pinpoint successful approaches that can be most reliably duplicated.
Student researchers also discovered challenges in areas that Westerners might take for granted. "Weather reporting is a big problem," explained Michael Manoochehri. Local weather forecasts are often unavailable, and even when available, the forecasts may take a week or more to reach the rural farmers. Without reliable predictions of rain or heat, farmers won't know the best times to plant or harvest, and may suffer crop losses. Researchers identified this as an area where improved communication could yield positive results.
Many development projects focus on educating farmers or increasing their access to knowledge, skills, and "best practices". The researchers evaluated projects like a farmers field school in Ethiopia, computer-based agricultural training resources, a "community knowledge worker" program in Uganda, and cell-phone based services to provide agricultural information via SMS.
Researchers were excited to discover success stories, like a coffee growers union in the Oromia region of Ethiopia which is working to improve the entire coffee value chain. The union provides market leverage through high-volume transactions directly to exporters, facilitates the growers' certification process, and engages in value-added services like washing and packaging. The union has increased income for local growers and has produced sufficient revenue to re-invest in the business and the community. "It was really inspiring to see such a well-executed value chain," said student researcher Sarah Van Wart.
The success of some projects was stymied by the slow timeline before their impacts became visible. For example, an irrigation cooperative in the Great Rift Valley in Ethiopia required a large upfront investment and years of community dialog, planning, construction, training, and market-building before yielding results. "These are not short timelines," explained student researcher Stefan Jacob. "Patience is necessary for real change."
In addition, land rights are a "gigantic problem," according to Manoochehri, especially in northern Uganda, where millions of farmers have been displaced by the ongoing civil war.
Although the project's goal is improvement of smallholder agriculture, the researchers examined challenges in the entire agricultural value chain. "Sometimes there are ways to increase farmers' livelihoods that aren't directly farm-focused," observed researcher Charlene Chen. For example, improving the infrastructure for export and transportation may open up markets and result in huge, though indirect, benefits to farmers.
The summer 2009 research trips are part of a larger I School focus on the use of information and communication technology in development (ICTD). This fall, the summer's student researchers are working with other I School students in the course Social Enterprise using ICTs for International Development, following up on their summer research by developing plans for various ICT-based social enterprises. The students are excited to be applying what they learned in Africa, and hopeful about the possibility of making a difference.
Similar student research trips are planned for summer 2010.
