Kamukwape's Diary

Born out of the IPO48, a 48 hour tech  bootcamp, a great tech-business idea M-Farm has found its way up the rudder, impacting positively on the economic well-being of Kenyan farmers, by providing them with a transparency tool to get real time crop prices and sell them. Farmers are plagued with problems affecting their productivity and livelihood, middlemen only offering meager prices for their produce, cereal boards delaying with payments, and expensive farm inputs. Many more people cannot get into agriculture, and just about 20% people were in the agriculture sector by 2011 when M-Farm started. M-Farm offers smallholder farmers with three services : price information, collective crop selling, and collective input buying. They are currently collecting wholesale market price information on 42 crops in five markets in Kenya. Pricing information is collected daily through independent data collectors using geocoding to ensure that the prices are being collected from...

The omnipresence  of mobile phones , their ability to ease access to various services andlow cost of maintenance, make it rewarding for people to use them as tools for enabling citizen participation in policy debates, to improve service delivery and to provide access to various information and communication services that impact their socio-economic development. The convergence of radio and mobile phones have increased the impact of citizen participation on social and economic development. Citizen participation is becoming a common phenomenon, which has also been adopted in the agricultural sector. One of the successful initiatives integrating citizen participation in agriculture through radio and mobile phone convergence is TRAC FM . Read Full Article   SOURCE: ICT4Ag Social Reporting Blog

"Youths are jobless and them developing Apps is just something to fulfill their hobbies.” Can you imagine? That's the comment that came from one of the Delegates at the ICT4Ag 2013 International Conference, Kigali, Rwanda. Put yourself in the shoes of the the youth, sit your self on that chair, and imagine listening to a respected person, a leader and credible consultant utter those words in the full presence of the youth. Like a sharp double edged sword, they would pierce in your heart, like a sharp stick accidentally plucking your ear they would resonate. This is just an example of many other humiliations youths undergo as they struggle to achieve their career goals. Youths are usually perceived as not so serious folks, who have no direction or clearly set goals. In many cases they are used as rubber stamps, just as some useful idiots not so important. Seemingly, not so important that the world can do without them. Yet, the youth are in the fore front of the gre...