As Tigo Tanzania and TechnoServe are getting ready to launch their full Tigo Kilimo service in Tanzania, the first lessons from the pilot project have been learned. Piloting of the service took place in the Morogoro region of Tanzania with more than 150 farmers participating in a two-month trial of the USSD-based information service. The piloted service provided three types of information to farmers: market prices, weather forecast and agronomy tips on crops.

We are sharing eight lessons derived from the pilot that would influence the final design of the Agricultural VAS, to be launched by Tigo Tanzania later this year.

1. Text format has its limitations. Limitations that come with a USSD channel are related to two factors. The first one is common to all text-based formats of agricultural information – ability of the user with low literacy to comprehend the written information. The second limitation is more USSD-specific and comes down to the length of the text piece. The limits on the length of the information piece could be pushed further to some extent by delivering a series of SMS messages in response to a USSD request, instead of providing a USSD message (USSD message doesn’t have storage and forwarding capability, and its length is limited to 182 characters). However usability of a text format is a remaining issue in the countries with low literacy and education levels, such as Tanzania (34% for women and 20% for men). Most of the farmers, about 70% of the users, participating in the pilot had only primary education.
2. Frequency of the price information directly contributes to its relevancy. Information on prices is changing over time, and for some commodities the fluctuation in price is higher than for others. Still, the more frequently price information is updated – the more valuable the market information service is to the farmer. Farmers who participated in the pilot requested for the price information to be updated at least every 2-3 days.
3. Localisation of information increases its value. Farmers find information most useful when it is was provided for their specific area. This insight on localisation has been previously explained in the Market Entry Toolkit, and was re-confirmed during the pilot. This is true for all types of information tested: weather, price and agronomy advice. A weather forecast in the nearest big town might be quite different from the forecast at the village level. The same is relevant for price information, as farmers are mostly looking to sell at their local markets. In a same way, information on inputs and their application has to be relevant to an agro-climatic zone to be valuable. Read more on the challenge of providing localised weather forecast via mobile in our recent blog.
4. Maize and rice are commonly grown crops. Staple crops are a necessity. Most of the farmers (84% of those participating in the pilot) named maize or rice as their top priority crop. Even within a small plot size, farmers find opportunity to diversify the crops they grow. Despite the prevalence of maize and rice in the pilot region, there is a variety of cash crops grown in a small scale, including sunflower, tomatoes, sugarcane, and sweet potatoes.
5. Market prices are relevant throughout the agricultural cycle, with a high demand peak during harvesting time. Although market price information is mostly relevant during harvesting time to help decide when and where to sell, farmers also used this type of information to make decisions on what to grow in the coming season.
6. USSD session limitation. Time out for a USSD session is different from one mobile network to another, averaging about 2 minutes. The USSD session length might not be long enough to search for the information required, as farmers complained. If adjustment of the time out length is out of service provider’s control, the USSD flow has to be carefully designed to suggest the shortest possible route to the desired content. It was also found that during USSD self-registration process open questions that required manual typing of the answer (farmer’s location or name) generated numerous spelling mistakes and took a very long time to get answered. The USSD registration menu was modified to limit the questions to only those that could be answered by selecting one of the options provided.
7. Seasonal forecast is very important. Although a 3- and 5-day forecast was found useful for immediate planning (example: ‘identifying a proper day for milling’), farmers still emphasized the importance of a seasonal forecast for their long-term decision-making.
8. Farmers are willing to share the information with their community. Farmers participating in the pilot were very willing to share the information about the availability of the service to their friends and wider community, and the word about the pilot has spread much faster than expected. Moreover, they were equally ready to share the specific advice received through the service, such as updates on the weather forecast. This finding might suggest community-centered service design versus service tailored to individual users. This hypothesis however has to be properly tested in each particular market.

Overall the pilot has reconfirmed the importance of providing relevant agricultural information to farmers and has received a positive reaction within the farming community. We are sure to have more learnings to discover and share as this mFarmer-supported project by Tigo Tanzania goes live on a larger scale.

More on Tigo Kilimo service from Yaya Ndjore, project manager at Tigo