Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. 11 May, 2014
The Alliance for a Green
Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in collaboration with Image-Ad, a
Ghanaian-based ICT Company, will organize a two-day training workshop – May
12-13, 2014
“ in Dar es Salaam for agribusinesses in Tanzania. The
workshop, will bring together over 30 stakeholders across Tanzania, and
seeks to provide training to these stakeholders on the use of the mFarms,
an ICT market information platform developed by Image-Ad. Potential
beneficiaries of the training vary from produce buying companies,
farmer-based organizations, agro-input importers and distributors across
the country. This is expected to help agriculture stakeholders,
particularly smallholder farmers, have easy access to and use market
information to improve their day-to-day agriculture businesses, and their
general livelihoods.
Access to market information in the agriculture industry in Africa is a
challenge to most farmers. Though productivity of agricultural produce is
increasing as a result of improved farming technologies and practices,
farmers still go through the challenge of accessing markets to sell these
produce. To address this and other related challenges in the sector, AGRA
is providing financial support to Image-AD to develop appropriate tools and
systems on the mFarms platform to help farmers collect and share
agriculture data seamlessly using mobile phone devices. This is aimed at
integrating value chain actors in the agricultural sector.
“We provide tools and technologies to allow value chain actors; farmers,
agro-dealers, importers of fertilizers and other agro-inputs, processing
companies, marketing companies (aggregators), warehouse operators, haulage
companies to network among themselves and provide and share actionable
information. We also provide customization services to allow different
organizations relate to the platform in different ways to meet their
specific needsâ€, said Mr. Godfrey Ekuban, Marketing Manager of Image-Ad..
“mFarms is an integrated web and mobile phone based platform designed to
help stakeholder in the agricultural value chain communicate with each
other efficiently, establish and maintain business relationships and manage
the flow of goods and services among themâ€, noted Mr. Kwame Bentil, CEO of
Image-Ad,
“The mFarms platform contributes to the reduction on transaction cost of
agribusiness providers, and improves the services rendered to smallholder
farmers. By so doing, agribusinesses are able to expand their distribution
channels to more remote rural areas, and offer quality services to
smallholder farmersâ€, said Mr. Matiéyédou Konlambigue, Program Officer for
Market Access at AGRA.