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All things ICT and mobile germane to the base of the pyramid

Target Market Segmentation and Education: Comparing agriculture digital payments systems

02 Oct 2015
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In 2007, the same year that the pioneering M-Pesa in Kenya was launched, another, lesser-known digital payments system was started in Colombia. In partnership with the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation, the Bank of Bogota launched Cedula, a smartcard digital payments initiative that was meant to be a digital channel through which the federation would pay its 574,000 coffee farmers for their beans. A traditional agriculture cooperative, the federation provides agriculture extension services (knowledge transfer) and technical assistance as well as purchases coffee beans on behalf of its coffee farmers – the pride of Colombia’s agricultural economy. A key function of the federation – or any agriculture cooperative – is the transfer of knowledge to farmers about good agriculture practices in a wide range of areas, including better production quantity/quality, better post-harvest handling, agriculture marketing and much more. Within its scope as an agriculture cooperative, the federation sought to leverage the membership ID card of member farmers by partnering with the Bank of Bogota and converting it to the Cedula magnetic strip smartcard. The federation deserves credit for its visionary pursuit of this digital payments mechanism that it initiated in 2007 – the same year that the pioneering M-Pesa in Kenya...
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A Comprehensive ICT4D mHub Platform?

09 Jul 2015
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I had the pleasure of participating in and being a lunch table discussion leader for the recent ICT4AG conference here is Washington D.C. As I’ve reflected on the various presentations and coffee break conversations it seems that we can imagine what might be the next generation of ICT4AG or more broadly ICT4D. Currently there are numerous applications/functionalities but they are not synced with each other. So perhaps the next generation will be a comprehensive mHub type of platform that is multi-sectoral (e.g. agriculture, health, education, etc.) and multi-functional.  This is an expansion of what was a formal outcome of another ICT4AG conference in Kigali, Rwanda in November 2013.  That conference  imagined that the next generation of ICT4AG would be a comprehensive platform(s) that includes multiple agriculture functionalities that align with each other. Such type of comprehensive platform for multi-sectoral and economically viable mobile money and mobile solution functionalities for rural communities will be a manifestation of the vision in the Gates Annual Letter 2015 that “the lives of people in poor countries will improve faster in the next 15 years than at any other time in history.”  If we accept this notion of an eventual aggregation of all these wonderful ICT/mobile...
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Blog Description

Welcome to our blog.
Mobile solutions for rural communities is an exciting area. Advancements in models, applications, platforms and functionalities are rapid. You are welcome to stay tuned to this blog as we try to keep up with these rapid changes and put forth ways to most strategically integrate them into rural communities.