The Grameen Foundation has been leasing smartphones to communities in Uganda so that they can receive vital information to avert devastating crop failure
The ‘community knowledge workers’ (CKW) receive information such as weather reports, disease diagnostics and market prices, from a central database in Kampala and pass it on to their neighbours. They also gather information that microfinance organisation, Grameen, then relays to major agricultural organisations and food programmes.
In Uganda alone, 10mn people, or about 30 per cent of the population, own mobile phones. However, in a country in which a third of the adult population cannot read or write, a digital divide persists. The CKW scheme is addressing this problem by training operatives to use phones for entrepreneurial as well as social purposes.
By creating an information flow between economic centres and remote places such as Lagude, Grameen is not only helping to protect local farmers against the ravages of famine: it is also bringing them into the global marketplace and giving them the tools to navigate it.
* This article was adapted from an original story in The Irish Times that was produced with support from the Simon Cumber Media Fund
