Amon Sa­ba Saakana

In de­vel­op­ing so­ci­eties around the world, in­for­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­o­gy (ICT) is trans­form­ing agri­cul­ture and em­pow­er­ing com­mu­ni­ties. Here are some ex­am­ples which re­sult when agri­cul­ture meets tech­nol­o­gy.

Nano Ganesh, In­dia

"Nano Ganesh" is a mo­bile-phone adap­ta­tion that trig­gers ir­ri­ga­tion pumps re­mote­ly. It was de­signed by an In­di­an en­gi­neer to make it eas­i­er for In­di­an farm­ers to wa­ter their crops. The Nano Ganesh es­sen­tial­ly con­nects a mo­bile phone to the elec­tric wa­ter pump, mean­ing it can be turned on and off with a phone call. The de­vice not on­ly saves farm­ers a long walk, but al­so saves wa­ter.

African Cashew Ini­tia­tive "vir­tu­al co-op­er­a­tives," Ghana

The African Cashew Ini­tia­tive, in part­ner­ship with IT ser­vices firm SAP, have de­vised a smart­phone ap­pli­ca­tion to cashew farm­ers in Ghana to pro­vide stock in­for­ma­tion to their co-op­er­a­tive, en­abling the co-op­er­a­tive to plan trans­port, pro­cess­ing and pay­ment ac­tiv­i­ties more ef­fi­cient­ly. These "vir­tu­al co-op­er­a­tives" gives ac­cess up-to-date mar­ket and price in­for­ma­tion, which im­proves trans­paren­cy and gen­er­ates sales and pro­duc­tion da­ta to aid plan­ning.

E-TIC, Mali and Sene­gal

E-TIC is an SMS-based sub­scrip­tion ser­vice to pro­vide farm­ers in rur­al ar­eas with wide range of in­for­ma­tion which they would oth­er­wise have not been able to ac­cess. The in­for­ma­tion, in­valu­able to their work and liveli­hood and sent via SMS, in­cludes mar­ket prices and weath­er alerts, but al­so best prac­tice in­for­ma­tion re­gard­ing farm­ing and an­i­mal hus­bandry.

mFish­eries, T&T

mFish­eries is an in­no­v­a­tive suite of mo­bile ap­pli­ca­tions de­vel­oped by Dr Kim Mal­lalieu and a team at the UWI St Au­gus­tine cam­pus to ad­dress the par­tic­u­lar needs of the Caribbean fish­ing in­dus­try.mFish­eries pro­vides ac­cess to fish and fish pro­cess­ing best prac­tices and con­nects sup­pli­ers and con­sumers, and takes ad­van­tage of the lo­ca­tion po­si­tion­ing func­tion com­mon in most mo­biles to pro­vide nav­i­ga­tion­al and search and res­cue func­tion­al­i­ties.

Bevil Wood­ing is the chief knowl­edge of­fi­cer at Con­gress WBN, an in­ter­na­tion­al non-prof­it or­gan­i­sa­tion and an In­ter­net strate­gist with US-re­search firm, Pack­et Clear­ing House. He is al­so the founder of Bright­Path Foun­da­tion, cre­at­ing Caribbean-fo­cused dig­i­tal con­tent, apps and train­ing pro­grammes. Twit­ter: @bevil­wood­ing Face­book: face­book.com/bevil­wood­ing