DatAgro directly addresses 3 of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). First it directly addresses the goal to End Poverty and Hunger by improving agricultural growth and productivity for small-scale farmers, which will directly increase farmers' incomes and household food security. DatAgro also directly addresses the MDG to promote Environmental Sustainability, since it raises awareness about Chilean natural resources such as water conservation and the protection of biodiversity helping to promote sustainable farming and living, and improve local livelihoods. Last, the project will address the Global Partnership MDG through communication of fair product pricing and trading, ensuring that small-scale farmers have the information they require to sell products fairly. Additionally, training in ICT use will open up avenues for sharing knowledge about better farming practices.

Background:

A mobile phone revolution is taking place in the developing world, which is now adding cell phone users faster per capita than in developed countries. While developed country organizations, raised on desktops and laptops, continue to view this as primarily a revolution in telephony (i.e., voice calling), this is dwarfed in significance by the co-revolution in mobile computing: many cell phones commonly used in developing countries have more memory and faster CPUs than early desktop computers. This means the celular revolution is a revolution in mobile computing, allowing large scale access to information technology and the internet to huge populations starved for access to news and other information. This puts DatAgro in a critical position to make a major impact in addressing world food security and environmental sustainability through information and knowledge accessed through ICTs.

Rural areas have proved especially difficult to connect to the Information Society due to their low population density and the generally low-income levels of rural populations that, together, make it difficult for market solutions to connectivity to emerge. Overcoming the ‘digital poverty' of rural areas, however, is an urgent challenge that receives particular attention in Chile, where social equity (and therefore digital equity) is a major governmental focus and rural food production and exportation is such an important part of the economy.

Project Objectives:

1) Increase access to information and communication technology for 300 agricultural producers, by identifying and providing access to digital content that is relevant to their agricultural productivity as well as cultural and social needs and interests;

2) Develop a robust application able to pull information from web-based RSS streams or send custom written notes as SMS messages to large communities of standard cellular phone users.
 
3) Increase the capacity of cooperative community farming organizations to provide additional and improved services for their agricultural producers in order to increase their production and promote their full inclusion in the information society.

Project Description

We are taking advantage of the high penetration rate of cellphones in Latin America to allow rural farming cooperatives in Latin America, beginning with Chile, to define the types of information most critical to their lives and livelihoods and receive it via text messages. Based on extensive consultations with the Chilean cooperative performed by project partner FIA, the Foundation for Agrarian Innovation, we have created content for distribution via SMS in the following areas:

1) Agricultural Innovation: technical agricultural information to increase crop yields or decrease expenses,
2) Emergency Alerts: Urgent messages regarding unexpected freezing temperatures, earthquakes (prevalent in Chile), etc.
3) Micro-climate Weather: Accurate, hyper-local weather conditions and forecasts as reported by 100 new weather monitoring stations being created by FIA
4) COOPEUMO: News and messages from the farming Cooperative of Peumo (COOPEUMO)
5) News: News gathered from web-based RSS streams and forwarded in the form of SMS messages

The system is designed to work even over slow, less-than-GPRS networks, by using the latest techniques in data compression/decompression to transmit and receive by enhanced SMS. This aspect of the project, by allowing viewing of news and information on commonly used cell phones, will enormously expand the population able to benefit from the system.

Partners

Leading Project Organization

DataDyne.org (sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation) is a leading developer of information technology solutions for developing countries, and its principals have worked more than 30 combined years in developing country issues with organizations such as the UN, the World Bank, the CDC, the Aga Khan Foundation, and many others. DataDyne.org's director, Dr. Joel Selanikio a physician, epidemiologist, and technologist is a pioneer in the application of mobile computing to developing country problems and issues. We also know how to create game-changing free opensource software. As an example, the EpiSurveyor project (described in more detail below), is a free and open-source project to allow mobile collection and distribution of health data in developing countries, has received awards from the World Bank and UN Foundation, and has been adopted by the World Health Organization as a standard for public health data collection for every country in sub-Saharan Africa. Currently, WHO and CDC are working with DataDyne.org to roll out EpiSurveyor throughout sub-Saharan Africa, and potentially in Southeast Asia and South America. DataDyne.org is also working with the UN Foundation to develop SMS-based continuing education systems for health workers in Southeast Asia. Importantly, ALL of DataDyne.org's software development takes place in developing countries by teams of local programmers (EpiSurveyor development, for example, takes place in Bangalore, Nairobi, and Johannesburg), providing jobs and development expertise to local programmers.

Project Implementing Organization

The Zoltner Consulting Group (ZCG) is a Santiago-based small business dedicated to the creation and implementation of initiatives infvolving the innovative appropriation and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in order to promote human and economic development and social inclusion processes. ZCG played a large role in project design, and is leading the pilot project implementation and management in a rural, agricultural region of Chile.

(Pilot) Project Supporting Organizations

FIA, the Fund for Agricultural Innovation, is a Chilean governmental agency that works closely with agrarian communities to understand their information interests and needs and to locate, edit and/or create appropriate content to meet those needs (resulting in the creation of micro-weather stations, for example). FIA is therefore a key partner responsible for sending a content stream of locally relevant information to rural agricultural producers.

UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), is responsible for financial support, and the provision of educational content for rural agrarian farmers.

Coopeumo is a local agrarian cooperative of fruit farmers in the town of Peumo, and responsible for the local implementation of the project among cooperative members.

National Chilean newspapers El Mostrador and El Mercurio are responsible for sending up-to-date news feeds, for which users will be able to choose preferred news streams.