• What we do
  • The People
  • About Us
  • Why Innovation Africa
  • Contact Us
Innovation AfricaCreating the Future Today
  • Feature Articles
  • Innovation
  • Agriculture
  • ICT
  • Technology
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Health
  • Store
  • Contact Us
Menu
  • Feature Articles
  • Innovation
  • Agriculture
  • ICT
  • Technology
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Health
  • Store
  • Contact Us
  • Disseminating maize agronomy technologies using interactive voice response in Malawi–the opportunities and pitfalls

    January 12, 2020 Editor 0

    This blog highlights the key messages of a presentation by the Africa RISING Malawi program coordinator, Regis Chikowo (Michigan State University) on 13 November 2019 at the 2019 ASA-CSSA-SSSA International Annual Meeting in San Antonio, Texas, USA. Approximately 4,000 scientists, professionals, educators and students attended the meeting whose theme was ‘Embracing the digital environment’.

    Key messages

    • Interactive voice response (IVR) messaging can support tailored communication and the adoption of better maize agronomy among smallholder farmers. 
    • Substantially more farmers who received tailored IVR messages planted maize early compared to those who received generic messages, as indicated by farmers who participated in an IVR survey on planting time practices.
    • Timing of urea side-dress fertilizer application and weeding two times were some of the recommended practices that IVR treated farmers reported taking up, to a substantial extent relative to control farmers. 
    • Overall, IVR survey responses were modest (40% of treatment farmers and 35% of control farmers completed the IVR survey), and there is a need for triangulation through in-person interviews and measurements of maize yield through yield cuts to conduct a proof of concept.

    Africa RISING works at the smallholder farm household, community and landscape levels. The program provides pathways out of hunger and poverty by offering demand-driven, locally tailored, resource-saving agricultural innovations for sustainable intensification that improve farmer livelihoods and resilience while conserving environmental resources.

    However, stifling realities like spatiotemporal diversities, complexities of smallholder farming systems, and limited access to information and extension services for farmers often add up to puncture the scale-up of sustainable intensification practices. Innovative methods and technologies and approaches to beat these challenges are therefore a necessity. In Malawi, the program is piloting the use of interactive voice response messages to disseminate maize agronomy technologies, and the early results offer interesting food for thought!

    The current indicative extension worker: farmer ratio in Malawi is often greater than 1:2000. Extension is complemented by a network of lead farmers; but this combined effort still falls far short of the requirement for effective dissemination of technologies to farmers. Interactive voice response (IVR) is a technology for reaching farmers who own cellphones in remote areas with agronomic messages. Farmers call a code number on their phones, listen to pre-recorded audio messages and respond to questions by pressing preset numbers on their phone keypads to access specific messages/record their responses onto the platform. These farmers gradually learn the art of good farming without the physical presence of an extension agent.

    In 2018, the Africa RISING team in Malawi led by Regis Chikowo in collaboration with a global social enterprise firm VIAMO, and the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture, which is led by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), initiated a pilot activity to establish the efficacy of IVR in disseminating maize agronomy messages to farmers. The team worked with two identical groups of farmers (treated/control), each composed of 140 households. The ‘treated’ group received IVR messages from three weeks before the cropping season until about maize physiological maturity while the ‘control’ group did not receive any messages. IVR messages sent to the farmers were about best maize agronomic practices that included land preparation, plant populations, fertilizer application and weeding. Later during the cropping season, the team conducted an IVR evaluation survey for both farmer groups, with follow up questions on maize agronomy. 

    Contrary to the 80–90% reach among farmers during the earlier IVR dissemination activity, we had a 30–35% response to the evaluation. Most of the older farmers did not respond. The evaluation showed that IVR was effective at encouraging farmers to plant early but fertilizer amount use was not influenced by IVR messaging. This was expected because acquiring crop inputs requires more time than the one-month window exposure to new knowledge via the platform. There was also evidence that questions with more than three response options confused farmers, resulting in incoherent responses. This work will continue into the 2019/2020 cropping season with a larger sample size of 700 farmers.


    Go to Source

    Related Posts

    • Economic diversification: A priority for action, now more than everEconomic diversification: A priority for action, now more than ever
    • Delivering on the Promise of Private-Public Partnerships
    • The (New) Skills You Need to Succeed in SalesThe (New) Skills You Need to Succeed in Sales
    • Innovation Strategy: Creating an Organic Growth MachineInnovation Strategy: Creating an Organic Growth Machine
    • The impact of knowledge-sharing mechanisms on employee performanceThe impact of knowledge-sharing mechanisms on employee performance
    • Africa Enterprise Challenge FundAfrica Enterprise Challenge Fund
    Sovrn
    Share

    Categories: Agriculture

    Towards a communication-based typology of management control modes: showing the relevance of communicative action for entrepreneurial settings Sustainable intensification: Is a systems perspective essential for integrated crop-livestock systems?

    Leave a Reply Cancel reply

    You must be logged in to post a comment.

Subscribe to our stories


 

Recent Posts

  • Entrepreneurial Alertness, Innovation Modes, And Business Models in Small- And Medium-Sized Enterprises December 30, 2021
  • The Strategic Role of Design in Driving Digital Innovation June 10, 2021
  • Correction to: Hybrid mosquitoes? Evidence from rural Tanzania on how local communities conceptualize and respond to modified mosquitoes as a tool for malaria control June 10, 2021
  • BRIEF FOCUS: Optimal spacing for groundnuts in smallholder farming systems June 9, 2021
  • COVID-19 pandemic: impacts on the achievements of Sustainable Development Goals in Africa June 9, 2021

Categories

Archives

Popular Post-All time

  • A review on biomass-based... 1k views
  • Apply Now: $500,000 for Y... 798 views
  • Can blockchain disrupt ge... 797 views
  • Test Your Value Propositi... 749 views
  • Prize-winning projects pr... 722 views

Recent Posts

  • Entrepreneurial Alertness, Innovation Modes, And Business Models in Small- And Medium-Sized Enterprises
  • The Strategic Role of Design in Driving Digital Innovation
  • Correction to: Hybrid mosquitoes? Evidence from rural Tanzania on how local communities conceptualize and respond to modified mosquitoes as a tool for malaria control
  • BRIEF FOCUS: Optimal spacing for groundnuts in smallholder farming systems
  • COVID-19 pandemic: impacts on the achievements of Sustainable Development Goals in Africa
  • Explicit knowledge networks and their relationship with productivity in SMEs
  • Intellectual property issues in artificial intelligence: specific reference to the service sector
  • Africa RISING publishes a livestock feed and forage production manual for Ethiopia
  • Transforming crop residues into a precious feed resource for small ruminants in northern Ghana
  • Photo report: West Africa project partners cap off 2020 with farmers field day events in Northern Ghana and Southern Mali

Tag Cloud

    africa African Agriculture Business Business model Business_Finance Company Crowdsourcing data Development East Africa economics Education Entrepreneur entrepreneurs Entrepreneurship ethiopia ghana Health_Medical_Pharma ict Information technology Innovation kenya knowledge Knowledge Management Leadership marketing mobile Mobile phone nigeria Open innovation Organization Research rwanda science Science and technology studies social enterprise social entrepreneurship south africa Strategic management strategy tanzania Technology Technology_Internet uganda

Categories

Archives

  • A review on biomass-based hydrogen production for renewable energy supply 1k views
  • Apply Now: $500,000 for Your Big Data Innovations in Agriculture 798 views
  • Can blockchain disrupt gender inequality? 797 views
  • Test Your Value Proposition: Supercharge Lean Startup and CustDev Principles 749 views
  • Prize-winning projects promote healthier eating, smarter crop investments 722 views

Copyright © 2005-2020 Innovation Africa Theme created by PWT. Powered by WordPress.org