Co-author: Heather Gilberds
Farmers in Nkwae village in the Singida Region of Tanzania demonstrate how they use mobile phones to record and share audio feedback.
Farmers have a lot of questions about the best ways to plant their crops to secure a better income and improve the nutrition of their families.
“When I grow beans, at the point when flowers develop, white insects attack them. I use a pesticide to kill the insects, but I don’t know if this is correct or not.” (Farmer, Mwanza, Tanzania)
“I have a question about the fertilizer we get from shops. I heard that there is a health hazard in using them. What health hazards do they have?” (Farmer, Mtwara, Tanzania)
“Where can I buy good quality seeds? Sometimes we buy seeds from dealers but they are low quality and the harvest is poor.” (Farmer, Meru, Tanzania)
In Tanzania, Farm Radio International’s innovative model of collecting feedback is helping farmers get the answers they need and share their voices with key decision-makers.
The feedback revolution
In many regions of rural Tanzania, ensuring a bountiful harvest, providing nutritious food for a household, and accessing markets to sell crops for a reasonable profit are common challenges that many farmers face. Lack of access to high-quality seeds and appropriate inputs, coupled with confusing and contradictory information and fraudulent suppliers, means that many farmers are in the dark about how best to improve their harvests and, in turn, their livelihoods.
Furthermore, farmers’ voices are often not brought to the table when decisions about how to improve agricultural production and rural development are weighed by governments and international aid organizations.
In light of this, there is a renewed emphasis among donors and practitioners on the need for systematic feedback loops to build accountability to farmers and ensure they are genuinely participating in their own development.
While radio is great for disseminating information to farmers, it is not able to listen back — to hear what their questions and concerns are. And given the nature of radio, where it broadcasts en masse to listeners, it is not able to tailor information to the unique contexts and circumstances of individual farmers and communities. We think that collecting feedback from farmers on a regular basis helps radio to listen to its audience. But, we have discovered that closing feedback loops — ensuring that farmers’ questions and concerns are responded to by agricultural experts and influencers — is a complex and critical part of the equation..
Ensuring agricultural development is farmer centred
Leveraging the ever-growing rates of mobile penetration in Tanzania, Farm Radio International’s radio and ICT innovation lab, The Hangar, created a feedback model called The Listening Post with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Using a mobile phone platform powered by interactive voice response (IVR) technology, the Listening Post is designed to receive rapid feedback from thousands of farmers about specific topics by sending them polls and inviting them to leave messages. In this way, the model is helping agricultural development actors ensure that farmers are at the center of their programs and priorities.
Ongoing farmer feedback through the Listening Post has helped organizations such as Purdue University and Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA) adapt their programs based on what they are hearing from farmers. For example, the Purdue Improved Cowpea Storage (PICS) project is improving distribution of their post-harvest storage bags by using farmer feedback facilitated by the Listening Post to determine which districts and communities have high demand but low supply of the bags. And MEDA is collecting farmer feedback to determine average increases in yield among farmers who use improved seeds, and to identify communities where suppliers are selling counterfeit seeds.
In addition to helping create better-targeted agricultural development initiatives, the Listening Post has a built-in mechanism for closing feedback loops — farmer radio programs. When farmers record questions or comments on the IVR system, radio broadcasters solicit expert opinions to respond to the most common questions and concerns, even updating farmers on how soon improved technologies or seeds will become available in their areas, or instructing them how to identify counterfeit inputs.
What we learned from farmers
Learning and adaptation are crucial for success in agricultural development, and Farm Radio International takes learning seriously. While we are confident that we developed a useful crowd-sourcing platform by linking mobile phones and radio, in the spirit of feedback, we asked farmers to help us assess how well the model is working.
With funding from the Institute of Development Studies’ Making All Voices Count research program, we conducted research in Tanzania to capture lessons learned about collecting real-time, unfiltered feedback from farmers, and using it to improve participatory and accountable development practice.
Through our research, we extracted a number of key lessons:
1. Sometimes less is more. While many crowdsourcing platform use SMS polls to collect data, farmers told us they prefer IVR. They would rather leave open-ended messages than participate in polls, preferring multichannel platforms that allow them the option to give feedback via voice as opposed to SMS.
2. Effective partnerships are the key to success. Without them, it is difficult to close feedback loops, and when farmers give feedback that is not responded to, they lose motivation and feel their voices are not heard. Combining a crowdsourcing tool with radio gives experts a forum for closing the feedback loop by directly answering the questions and concerns raised by farmers on community, regional, or national radio programs.
3. Offline processes are as important as the technology. Many initiatives have focused on the silver bullet — the newest technology that will radically change development. We learned that farmers in Tanzania prefer to receive information through face-to-face contact, and that traditional extension services are still trusted agricultural advisory services in many parts of Tanzania. Methods for collecting feedback like the Listening Post can extend the reach and improve the effectiveness of on-the-ground extension services, but they enhance rather than replace them. To effectively close feedback loops and put farmers at the center of agricultural development projects, Farm Radio International and other organizations need to work closely and collaboratively with governments, civil society and farmer groups.
Learn more by reading the research paper, Exploring the potential for interactive radio to improve accountability and responsiveness to small-scale farmers in Tanzania.
Farm Radio International works with more than 600 radio partners across 39 African countries, reaching tens of millions of small-scale farmers and their families. Learn more about its life-changing work at www.farmradio.org.
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