Tumsifu Lema, 68, is an organic farmer in Shirin Joro village in Tanzania. He grows mixed crops on his two acres of land, including vegetables, maize, sunflower and coffee, and he is constantly looking out for new organic farming techniques. Experimental plots planted with neighbouring farmers are a good source of new ideas. Lema would like to contact an organic farmers group in Uganda: he heard that they had successfully made and used a molasses-based organic fertilizer. But he had no way to get in contact with them.
Although Lema has heard of email and the Internet, he has never seen or used them. However, he likes the idea that email could help him communicate cheaply over long distances with people like the Ugandan organic farmers. Maybe email would have been very useful, Lema said. We had tried to make organic fertilizer using molasses, but it didnt work. We needed to learn from the experience of others.
Tumsifu is among the growing number of poor farmers in Tanzania who are just starting to consider the potential benefits of ICTs. Many, Lema included, are already using mobile phones, mainly only to communicate with children living away from home and other distant family members. But with increasing frequency, people are using their mobiles to exchange agricultural information with others in their farmer groups between meetings, or to obtain updated information about local markets. In places like Shirin Joro, where the majority of people still rely on the village billboard as their main source of information, widespread use of computers and the Internet for everyday communication might seem a long way off.
However, early experience emerging from the First Mile Project shows that access to the technology is not as far away as one might think. Although people dont have direct access to email and the Internet, theyre really not very far away from it at all, says Jonathan Cooke, a communication expert who conducted a study on access to ICTs in Tanzania in June 2005. Through an intermediary, or possibly two, they can use Internet and email today. Even though the nearest Internet café may be 100 kilometres away, people are constantly travelling between the most remote villages and the nearest town where there is an Internet provider.
For Cooke, more widespread use of email and the Internet in Tanzanias rural areas is foreseeable in the near future. It is absolutely realistic to expect that use of the Internet is going to increase, even in the most remote rural areas, as groups such as farmer organizations start to use this form of communication to work, to share ideas between groups and between individuals over long distances, he says. It is because of the very, very low cost of the technology and the fact that you can share much larger amounts of information than you can through text messages on mobile phones.
Source:IFAD
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