Snippets from Mobile World Congress 2013 – Part 1: GSMA mAgri Seminar

Last week 72,000 people from around the world arrived in Barcelona for the annual Mobile World Congress. This is my fifth year at Congress and it’s exciting that year on year, there is more attention on mobile solutions for emerging markets. Here are some of my highlights from MWC 2013!

GSMA mAgri Seminar: Taking Mobile Agriculture Innovation to Market

 For our second mAgri seminar at MWC, we had a fantastic line-up from Vodafone Turkey, China Mobile, Tigo Tanzania, HandyGo India, Nano Ganesh and IFDC/Grameen Foundation.  These speakers shared insights from their experience of creating mAgri services for millions of farmers. I started the session by talking about the market opportunity – mobile phones have has now reached rural areas where other forms of agriculture services does not reach and at the same time the number of people involved in agriculture represent the largest potential customer segment for Operators. There almost 100 mAgri products and services on the GSMA MDI tracker and it’s clear that mobile agriculture has become an exciting growth area for the mobile industry.  Reaching scale is usually necessary for financial sustainability and the first panel of Operators spoke about how they have taken their products to market to reach scale. We also showed a short video of farmers in Kenya, Tanzania and India telling us what their information needs are and how mobile can help with access. Click here to watch the video.

The CEO of Vodafone Turkey, Serpil Timuray presented the Vodafone Farmers’ Club in Turkey which has 700,000 members, has sent over 290 million agriculture SMS to date and has estimated to provide a 12% increase in productivity to farmers. Serpil explained that services that provide a social contribution have now become core to the strategy for mobile operators.

China Mobile provided details of its agri-info service that has reached over 50 million customers; information is primarily provided via a call centre that has hundreds of agri-call centre agents to answer farmers’ calls. Dan Zhou from China Mobile explained how he sees a potential market opportunity of 700-800 million farmers in China.

Praveen Rajpal the CEO of HandyGo (a VAS company in India) outlined their new agriculture service in India called mKisan [1] which has already topped 100,000 crop and livestock farmers in less than 4 months using a voice based service and is designed to reach over one million customers by the end of next year.

Tigo Tanzania was represented by my colleague Natalia Pshenichnaya who spoke about Tigo’s new service Tigo Kilimo, which has been launched across Tanzania to reach hundreds of thousands of farmers. The service has been carefully designed to ensure its usability and relevance for farmers. If Tigo can create a popular product then there is the opportunity to take this to other countries to be adapted and launched.

For more information on each of these services and contact details- please click here.

Key takeaways

Some key takeaways from the panel discussion included:

  • Partnerships continue to be absolutely crucial to ensure quality of service and relevance, and to develop services that can reach the market at scale (using the respective assets from the mobile and agriculture partner)
  • Operators continue to investigate different business models to ensure the price point for farmers remains affordable, partnering with business or government who might become the “customer” of the service is one option
  • The future of mAgri services will focus on ensuring personalised and relevant services (including new ways to use location based tools) and integration with financial services to provide a holistic product to support farmers’ business in the form of payments, credit, savings or insurance.

In the seminar we also highlighted two new innovations using mobile to benefit the agriculture sector.  Nano Ganesh is a service that uses machine to machine technology to facilitate more economical irrigation, allowing farmers in India to use their mobile to control their water pump. Over 15,000 farmers have bought this product and the company (Ossian Agro Automation) sees potential to support many more farmers. The second product was from IFDC and Grameen Foundation which uses a barcode (which works like an airtime scratch-off coupon) as a way to detect whether an agro-chemical is counterfeit or genuine. This is important in countries like Uganda where it is estimated that 40% of chemicals are counterfeit.

Want to know more? You can download the slides from the seminar and we’ll be sharing the video recording of the seminar on our website next week.



[1] The GSMA mAgri team is providing support to Handygo under the mFarmer Initiative, a partnership between GSMA, USAID and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

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