This is the first entry of a series of blog posts highlighting the opportunities and benefits for mobile operators to invest in weather forecasting provision. This blog post focuses on the opportunity to improve the dissemination of weather information.

What’s the weather going to be like tomorrow? For most of us, this is a simple question for which the answer can be found at the tip of our fingertips. For the vast rural population in the developing world, the answer isn’t as straightforward. In fact, for the majority of the 2 billion people depending on rain-fed agriculture for their livelihood, access to accurate, localised weather forecasts is a challenge.

We’ve just released a new report that shows how mobile can contribute to improving weather forecasting and monitoring in developing countries. The paper also shows how weather information can help mobile operators and VAS providers evolve the value proposition for agricultural value added services (Agri VAS), increasing the opportunity for scalability and impact of their services.

In the developing world, weather forecasts are predominantly disseminated via traditional media outlets such as TVs and radios. These channels are not easily accessible by all, especially for farmers out in the field who need to time their activities to catch weather updates. Receiving information on weather forecasts is critical for agricultural workers to organise their farming practices, especially in tropical areas where weather patterns can vary largely within short distances. Additionally, the need for weather information is exacerbated by the unpredictable changes of weather patterns in the last decades and its impact on global food supply [1].

Alongside market price information and agronomic advice, weather forecasts are a typical component of mAgri services. However, through our research we’ve identified two main challenges hindering the full value potential weather service information can deliver. These are:

• The source of weather information is often limited to national government agencies with low capacity and obsolete technologies for provision of localised weather data (at best available at a regional and district level);
• Weather content remains generic and static providing little value to the users who look for frequent meteorological updates.

As the most ubiquitous ICT tool in developing countries, we argue that mobile is uniquely positioned to address these challenges. In fact, MNOs and VAS providers can and should invest in providing highly localised, possibly farm-level forecasts with actionable content to improve their overall Agri VAS offering. For farmers, the added value of accessing weather forecasts on their mobile and having information customised and localised to their needs could be very high.

The increasing adoption rate of smartphones with GPS capabilities is offering a technology-based solution to the challenge of localisation, but not for everyone. For the vast majority of the rural population who don’t have access to data services, Agri VAS that include weather forecasts delivered via voice and text channels and over 2G networks are still a need. In this respect, the mobile industry is able to leverage the following capacities:

• In the absence of GPS, low cost location based services (LBS) that leverage existing network intelligence (Cell ID and triangulation techniques) can provide location information needed for relevant weather forecasts (see sub chapter: ‘Creating value of geo location’ page. 12).
• To improve the quality of weather content information, MNOs can form new partnerships with alternative data providers, other than national meteorological agencies. Ignitia, aWhere and Foreca are a few examples of weather data service provider with modelling techniques offering high resolution and localised weather forecasts. In recent years, free and open data initiatives for weather and agriculture have also emerged as another source of weather forecasts (see sub chapter: ‘Improving weather forecasts in Agri VAS’ page. 10)

Exploiting the full value potential of weather information would mean placing weather forecasts at the core of the Agri VAS value proposition rather than an additional component of the service. There is an emerging opportunity for mobile to improve the weather information by linking forecasts to agronomic advice on how to react to these weather conditions.

Paired with its localisation ability, mobile’s unique capability to customise services to the individual user presents an opportunity to evolve the value proposition to weather adaptive models. In fact, as weather patterns threaten to worsen and affect global food supply, mobile can become the ICT tool helping smallholder farmers in developing countries become more resilient to these climate changes. (see chapter: ‘Evolution to weather adaptive and climate smart services’ page. 16)

Figure 1 – Evolution to mAgri holistic bundles

In sum, the report shows that the mobile industry can play a key role not only in disseminating weather forecasts but also in improving weather services by catalysing new content and technology providers. By increasing their focus on weather services, MNOs can evolve the value proposition of their rural services towards more holistic bundles including agronomic advice linked to localised weather forecasts and climate smart agronomic advice. In the next entry we will outline how these bundles can also provide a gateway to mobile money enabled agricultural financial services promoting rural financial inclusion.

Download: Weather Forecasting and Monitoring: Mobile Solutions for Climate Resilience

Notes:
[1] According to the World Bank, in Africa the effects of climate change could cause food production to increase by as much as 12% by 2030 and by up to 70% by 2080. “Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty”, World Bank 2015