African Agriculture recently featured a story about Tradenet, a new Ghana-based initiative to provide farmers in West Africa with up-to-date information about where they can get the best prices for their crops by cellphone. The idea is for them to not necessarily be locked into selling to merchants close to home because of lack of information about the possibility of better prices further away. But variations of the idea are being independently tried all over the continent as ever-increasing cellphone access changes many aspects of life even in remote, once isolated places.
An example is the Kenya Agricultural Commodity Exchange, which makes price information available on cell phones nationwide. It is one way farmers are gaining bargaining power in an increasingly global economy. Marketplace Public Radio recently went to the western Kenya town of Bungoma to see the impact that KACE's price information service is having on the lives of farmers.
KACE's founder, Dr. Adrian Mukhebi, says farmers using the service can earn about 25 percent more than those who don't by having access to market information. "If farmers around Africa used services like this, it could ignite the continent's development," says Mukhebi. "Without giving people handouts but using the private sector, using markets to give people incentives to sell, they can make money,create wealth and move out of poverty."
KACE also posts daily prices on chalkboards outside its office in Bungoma, a small town at the center of Kenya's second-largest agricultural market, and where thirty thousand small-scale farmers come from miles around to trade their goods. Managing director Alex Wasari says the boards mean even farmers without cell phones can haggle more effectively. "They can come early in the morning when they bring their goods and check the day's prices. Then when somebody offers them a low price they can say they have checked with KACE." Poultry and cattle farmer George Maufa welcomes the new service and says, "We used to be exploited because we didn't have the information."
The company also brokers trades through a new weekly radio program. DJs announce offers and bids on commodities from chickens to sweet potatoes. Interested listeners call an off-air number to make a deal, and KACE collects a commission.
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