A month or so has passed since the AGCommons team conducted its outreach mission to Mali and the other countries in West and East Africa. In that time, we have been compiling the meeting notes, snippets, photos, and other summaries of what we have heard from the outreach meetings, field trips, and mini-workshops. We have also been planning for Phase 2 of AGCommons (stay tuned!). This will be the first in a series of posts summarizing the outreach mission for each country we visited: Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda.
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. The 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 sub-regional 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 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.
In addition, the following key salient points and takeaways with respect to the AGCommons program were observed:
Mali’s APCAM provides a “network of networks” with a grassroots governance structure providing breadth and depth with respect to the Agriculture sector. A project is just underway to collect an inventory of agriculture sector actors in Mali and a registry of all farmers. APCAM has begun to see the value that information services can provide to smallholder farmers (if they are reached directly) and has several initiatives underway to further develop these resources. APCAM is beginning to explore micro-scale crop insurance program to address some of the risks inherent to their Sahelian region.
Pest and disease monitoring and reporting is very important in Mali since infestations can be widespread and catastrophic. The information needs to be delivered closer to farmers and farmers need to be trained at detection and reporting.
Updated Land cover data is needed for West Africa. This is mainly to help manage emerging and worsening conflicts between changes in agriculture, livestock, urbanization, etc. This dataset should be developed at a scale that is relevant to farmers vs. current scales (1:100K and 1:200K).
Radio bulletins need to be localized both in terms of language and site specific information.
SMS-based applications should be easily supportable by the current infrastructure in Mali. There are high bandwidth ISPs with interest in rural development and entrepreneurial zeal.
Various organizations are working on value chain optimization specifically focused on inputs (fertilizer, seeds, and technical support) and providing access to affordable inputs to smallholder farmers.
Leave a Reply