MANY African farmers and traders live complex economic and financial realities.
For such people, fragmented and siloed information is not helpful.
They need fluid platforms that can provide recommendations, comparisons and synthesised answers.
Working with thousands of farmers, traders and vendors has enabled service providers like eMKambo to develop unique pattern recognition insights around human behaviour, especially in mass markets.
Fragmented data slows down economic growth
The slow pace of data and information access slows down economic growth.
For instance, the rate of money in circulation is low when customers spend hours looking for what to buy.
A system that can sell commodities valued at US$100 within 10 minutes can sell commodities worth US$600 within an hour.
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In Mbare market, a US$1 becomes US$100 quickly due to the speed of transactions.
Commodities worth US$100 000 are sold within an hour.
If information is made available digitally, the speed of transactions would double benefits for farmers, traders, consumers and other actors.
When prices are suppressed, the value of our agriculture and commodities go down and the whole economy shrinks.
Where a farmer gets US$15 000 instead of US$20 000, it means his/her hectarage goes down by US$5 000 next season.
Every action has a lot of impacts on the performance of the agriculture sector.
If questions are not being answered from those affected directly, it means government has no system for collecting data and answering those questions.
A drone cannot answer those questions.
The informal sector has systems that enhance their networks to be able to generate employment.
If digital platforms enhance their performance, it means more people will be employed.
Having enhanced the value of agricultural commodities, prices will start earning twice and farmers will get good RoI [return of interest] and will increase production as well as employment.
Transporters will become quite busy.
Mobile network operators benefit from fragmented information
Fragmented and disjointed information systems benefit internet providers and mobile network operators.
These companies have set up WiFi data packages like 9 gigabites and 13 gigabites knowing that these packages exhaust before users find meaningful information.
They know that information that people are looking for is not readily available.
If there were institutions documenting important information and keeping it in accessible repositories, the cost of data would be low as people would find what they want quickly.
The absence of consolidated information is set to make Education 5.0 burdensome to parents in countries like Zimbabwe where most educational information is not available online.
Already, parents are losing a lot of money through digital learning as a lot of communication data is wasted by learners searching for information which should be easy to find.
Transforming markets through digital solutions
When properly set up with enough consultation, digital platforms can support policy processes to ensure stability, transparency and economic justice.
They will also improve transparency, not only in giving farmers better prices, but enhancing the value of commodities.
After producing, to what extent can farmers recoup their costs?
Input costs remain the same.
What systems are there for farmers to recover their costs?
The absence of a system that can help farmers to make a decision before travelling 300km to the market with a commodity imposes unfairness for farmers.
A bumper harvest is a result of organised systems.
African countries have become dependent on the West for food aid, medicine and technology due to the absence of early warning systems that show us the performance of our economies.
They tend to be affected more by climate change they don’t have systems for getting the best value from bumper harvests.
Better living standards for farmers can sustain food systems and inform policy direction.
Conversely, the failure of information systems imposes a burden on the fiscus through food imports.
One of the major challenges in Africa’s digital agriculture space is that software developers make a lot of assumptions.
There is lack of transition systems for knowledge and information from the source to inform the designing of digital platforms.
A lot of information seats on the production side where farmers and other indigenous knowledge holders are concentrated.
For a commodity that gets into the market to be what it is, a lot of knowledge was used.
What systems do we have to capture that data, information and knowledge from the source starting right from the seed?
How can digital platforms be used to organize markets and supply chains?
Currently, they are too disorganised in ways that hide opportunities for growth.
