Africa: Making Information and Communication Technologies Work for Food Security in Africa

This 6-page brief was prepared for the conference "Assuring Food and Nutrition Security in Africa by 2020: Prioritizing Actions, Strengthening Actors, and Facilitating Partnerships," held in Kampala, Uganda, April 1-3 2004.

The paper is situated in the context of the challenge Africa faces in meeting the main target of the first of the 8 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs): to halve the number of people suffering from malnutrition and hunger by 2015. The author states that bridging the digital divide through the development and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as fixed-line and mobile phones and internet services, will not directly solve this challenge, but it can make a significant contribution.

Romeo Bertolini writes that knowledge and information are important factors for accelerating agricultural development by increasing agricultural production and improving marketing and distribution. ICTs can enhance the integration and efficiency of agricultural systems by opening new communication pathways and reducing transaction costs, given greater accessibility of information about prices, transportation, and production technologies. Bertolini points out that ICT sector reform has promoted large-scale investments in telecommunications infrastructure in African countries. Despite this, the supply of phone or internet services in rural and remote areas is still hampered by underinvestment and lack of electricity.

Opportunities for ICTs in promoting food security discussed in this study include ICTs and agricultural production, ICTs and nutrition, and ICTs and the marketing and distribution of agricultural produce. The paper maintains that the telephone is the only ICT used (if any) by the majority of farmers in Africa. Research cited by the author indicates that, in terms of agricultural production, prices of inputs such as seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides are the most frequently telecommunicated information. ICTs also enable the exchange of information about innovations in crop varieties, pest control, manuring, weather forecasting, irrigation, and efficient monitoring methods. To take advantage of these opportunities, the African farmer also relies on intermediate agencies, such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs), extension services, and producer associations, which are more likely to have the necessary capacity and access to nationally and globally available information. To be more effective, it is proposed that these agencies shift from purely disseminating information to assessing and brokering relevant information.

ICTs have enabled international organisations to promote distance learning and ICT applications within their training programmes in this sector. Other ICT applications relevant to resource-sensitive agriculture involve satellite-based systems. Those relevant to the issue of land property rights, for instance, include administrative bodies increasingly using geographic information systems (GIS) and database applications for efficient land surveys and registration. According to the author, having a registered asset both encourages farmers to undertake sustainable land management and enables them to borrow funds against the asset (to invest in production means, for example). Moreover, geospatial and information tracking technologies are becoming inexpensive tools for monitoring environmental management. Best-practice databases can indicate new ways for intermediate organisations to encourage rural smallholders to use environmentally sustainable farming methods.

The paper suggests that policymakers and members of agricultural extension systems become more aware of the ways in which appropriate ICT-based instruments can help to influence agricultural practice and assist in the fight against malnutrition. Increased knowledge of food production systems through learning applications and access to best-practice data will, the author predicts, enable international expertise to trickle down to local levels. However, when regional and local representatives of organisations are not involved in such processes, effects will be reduced. Bertolini suggests that decisionmakers should, therefore, free up resources to build capacity for technologies to integrate regional and local intermediate organisations because they are the crucial link between ICT programmes and the rural population. For food distribution and marketing, that is, the role of information is essential.

The study provides the following recommendations for governments. It suggests that they provide the following support:

• a sound, market-oriented regulatory framework;
• universal access regulations and mechanisms that motivate operators to serve regions where it is
  economically infeasible but socially desirable for
  them to do so;
• incentives such as a sound business and taxation environment to encourage investor and donor involvement in ICT infrastructure development in Africa;
• the preconditions for inter-African collaboration
  through, for example, the introduction of common
  standards, cross-border trade liberalisation, ICT-based monitoring, forecast programmes, and so on;
• support to research institutions and other nonprofit participants who help to safeguard the demand-driven implementation of ICT tools that assess and transmit commodity prices, thereby allowing markets to emerge;
• support for ICT use to increase the efficiency of
  knowledge systems for agricultural production, and
  support for intermediate organisations in terms of
  transferring knowledge from global or national to
  local levels, which in most countries will begin with
  the integration of agricultural extension services
  into knowledge systems; and
• leadership in combining existing media channels such as rural radio stations with ICTs to match potential local demand with global content and distribute the gained information widely in the relevant languages.