Stephen Muchiri's viewpoint
Stephen Muchiri is chief executive officer of the Eastern African Farmers Federation (EAFF). As with other farmers’ associations, EAFF was set up to help its members connect to and learn from each other but, increasingly, the organisation is also helping to connect farmers to other agricultural actors.
In this digital age, can you describe what the ‘connected’ farmer means to you?
A connected farmer owns a mobile phone to make transactions, get inputs, call buyers, receive weather and pest alerts and can call the agro-vet or extension officer for advice. For farmers to attract investors, they have to use technology, especially ICTs. ICTs are revolutionising agriculture; the opportunities are enormous. However, farmers need a mindset shift - they have to become more business-like and become part of the private sector instead of relying on development agencies and donors for support.
How do farmers’ organisations like EAFF help to ‘connect’ farmers to other value chain actors?
We have had a lot of interesting innovations in ICT4Ag but the missing link has been a lack of ownership by farmers and farmer associations. EAFF has partnered with service providers, particularly financial partners and commodity buyers, to develop an interactive mobile platform known as the ‘e-granary’. By aggregating farmers in 30 cooperatives for maize and rice, we can locate farmers by gender, age, enterprise, and when and what they planted. This enables us to produce harvest projections. Even on a very simple phone, farmers can interact with the platform. Within 2 months of piloting e-granary, we had registered 20,000 farmers. As the platform gets upscaled, we will add other services e.g. extension, inputs, insurance, and access to credit according to farmers’ needs.
What steps will help farmers be better connected?
Setting up these digital platforms is expensive and require resources. To be a part of the process, farmers need skills and capacity building to interact with the platform and see the benefits. Farmers also need incentives to engage. For example, the association needs to help market farmers’ products. We can have a wonderful system but if people don’t know how to use or interact with it, then it is wasted. We want farmers to use the technology very easily and the data generated should not be a burden to the farmer. The data generated can also help to highlight the challenges that farmers face to inform policies and bring about change.
