The AGCommons team spent 5 days in Burkina Faso in late March 2009, visiting a variety of organizations, from the Ministry of Agriculture, research organizations, farmer’s associations, and farmers. Here is what we heard:
Many organizations produce several types of information, including market prices, food security, but the information is being produced for national policy making and is not aimed at the farmer. Burkina’s regional information centers as well as SMS distribution are the most desired channels for disseminating information to farmers. Building trust with farmers is critical to their acceptance of information. Farmers need to see proof that new technologies work. Climate risk is so big, trust is hard to establish.
The Ministry of Agriculture has a well formed Early Warning System and they are moving to develop information products from this system tailored to farmers. The main obstacle to doing this is the lack of a means to disseminate the information to farmers.
Extension agents and other organizations are challenged to reach women farmers. One women farmers’ association has their own system of 12 women extension workers, which they pay. It is much more difficult to provide information to women farmers. The men own the radios and the cell phones and are generally the ones who attend the farmers meetings.Most women farmers are illiterate (over 80%) and couldn’t read a text message. Capacity building must be provided to overcome women’s literacy issues before geo-information solutions are deployed
In addition, the following key salient points and takeaways with respect to the AGCommons program were observed:
· TV and internet information channels are reaching certain farmers and villages. Video and pictures overcome the language localization needs and illiteracy challenge which is especially prevalent amongst women.
· Market information is produced at the national level for farmers that could be incorporated into an AGCommons project on spatially enabling market price information and disseminating to farmers in a more real-time basis. This information is received from extension agents via post, fax and telephone. The timeliness of the data is usually 1 week.
There is still a gap to getting the information the last 10 km. An ICT solution could enable information to be made location specific and to speed the exchange of information between farmers, intermediaries and national level as the information provider.
· There is a strong national network of farmer’s organizations with ROPPA, within Burkina, and throughout West Africa. ROPPA currently desires a comprehensive database for farmer support that includes relevant geospatial layers. It would be like a participatory GIS that allow individuals in the field to participate in the maintenance of data.
· We met with several farmers’ association with excellent information networks. They provide information to the farmers through local radio stations, meetings, news bulletins. They would like to provide more information to farmers using other methods, including SMS, but often don’t have the financial and technical resources.
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