How far we’ve come: comparing GSMA mAgri events in 2011 and 2014

mAgri Working Group Cape Town 2014

Back in June 2011, the GSMA mAgri team held its first Working Group meeting in Cape Town. We had a small gathering – the early pioneers of mAgri- and the session mainly focused on the launch of the mFarmer Initiative. Three and a half years later, we’ve just been back in Cape Town to host 3 events alongside the GSMA’s Africa 360 Conference earlier this month. Our events this year highlighted to me how far the mAgri industry has come since that first Cape Town event in 2011. Below are some of the highlights.

mAgri Working Group Highlights 2011

mAgri Working Group Cape Town 2011

MNOs can scale their Agri VAS

During the mAgri Working Group meeting on Tuesday 4th November, we shared insights from the 4 services we’ve been working with under the mFarmer Initiative: Orange Mali, Airtel Kenya, Tigo Tanzania and Handygo in India. You’ll find many of these insights summarised in our recent blog here and plenty more insights here.  If we compare with our event in 2011 when we were still encouraging MNOs to look at mAgri as an opportunity, today we have evidence that Agri VAS are reaching scale:

  • In India Handygo has reached 840,000 users
  • Tigo Kilimo in Tanzania has reached 370,000
  • Orange Mali has 150,000 users
  • IKSL in India has around 3.3m users

We’re also seeing that farmers are willing to pay to access actionable and relevant information via their mobile phones (e.g. 80% of surveyed Tigo Kilimo users who have tried the service said they would pay for it).

We held a session on the Wednesday entitled “How to roll-out successful Agri VAS” and it wasn’t GSMA presenting this time, it was led by Orange Mali and IKSL (India). The business case for mAgri is getting stronger.

mAgri services have an impact on farmers’ lives

We’re excited to be at the stage where we can now share the stories about how mAgri services have impacted farmers’ lives. Our partners from Agricultural Learning and Impacts Network (ALINe) who manage the monitoring and evaluation across the mFarmer services, shared some evidence of impact on mAgri service users. Here are some highlights from their session:

  • Young farmers and women farmers are more likely to become repeat users
  • Around one-third of repeat users report acting on advice or information from mAgri services
  • Behaviour change is supported by a user-friendly interface giving access to actionable, compelling content
  • Improved crop yield is the most commonly reported benefit of utilizing mAgri advice to make changes

The rise of Agri mobile financial services

Mobile or digital financial services for rural people in emerging markets is the hot topic at the moment. In 2011, mobile money managers weren’t yet looking at this opportunity and there were very few case studies to refer to. This year we saw the topic of “Building the Ecosystem” on the main agenda at the GSMA Mobile Money for the Unbanked event in Cape Town, and we’re seeing enormous interest from MNOs, financial service providers, investors and others who recognize the mobile money sector is sufficiently mature in many markets for Agri MFS.

During our session on Wednesday 5th November- “Market opportunity for Agri MFS”, we heard from ACRE, one of the pioneers in the Agri MFS space who described their successful model of providing weather index insurance to over 145,000 smallholders in Kenya and Rwanda. The audience also heard from Technoservewho described their mobile supply chain management solution for agribusiness developed in partnership with Vodafone and USAID under the Connected Farmer Alliance. One of the interesting challenges discussed in the session was around who should do the customer education for Agri MFS. It was debated whether MNOs are the right people to do this, while there are also challenges of relying too much on third parties (eg. Agribusinesses).

The 2014 Cape Town event was quite a milestone for the GSMA mAgri team. We were delighted to have insights and evidence from mFarmer Initiative services and to have encouraged MNOs and service providers to take the stage to discuss live Agri VAS and Agri MFS deployments. We were learning from others who are reaching farmers via different channels such as TV (Shamba Shape Up), and we had 4 of our new grantees (Dialog Sri Lanka, Vodafone Ghana, Grameenphone Bangladesh and Airtel Malawi) present – excited to take the industry to the next level.

Our next event will be at Mobile World Congress in March 2015 and we hope to see some of you there!

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