Mali has a very rich agricultural history and with significant opportunity for expansion and intensification of its agricultural lands, has potential to be a producer of grains to supply West Africa and beyond.
Networks to support farmers are numerous and well coordinated. The government, research, professional and commercial communities communicate well at many organizational levels. Additionally, many of these organizations are populated from the grass roots with farmers and village leaders elected locally to serve in positions at subregional and national levels. There is awareness of the under-representation of women and some attempts to balance that representation for women.
The Government of Mali has placed strategic focus on communications technologies and agriculture to fuel development. These priorities provide an excellent environment of support for the vision of the AGCommons program. Mali’s two main wireless telephony providers, Orange and Malitel, have GSM coverage across nearly all of the cultivated area of Mali and the Cotton and Rice agricultural sectors provide excellent examples of how effective, bi-directional information dissemination can propel development.
Malian smallholder farmers have expressed desire for site-specific information to support day to day decision-making on the farm. This has been done to some extent through an extensive rural radio network but this information pathway has many limitations and most would say this approach does not effectively cross “the last 10 kilometers”.
The AGCommons team has found in Mali many opportunities to formulate information solutions for farmers with many motivated and enthusiastic local partners. Many of these opportunities will be informed and guided by local initiatives and action plans already in place or underway.
The team has heard specific information needs around input (fertilizer and seeds) location and pricing, transport availability and pricing, pest and disease monitoring, weather and climate, and above all market information.
The needs are here, the opportunity is ripe, now to identify the “killer app” to provide immediate value and generate momentum!
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