MobileActive.org

In places such as rural India, small-scale farmers struggle to meet the challenges of fierce global competition, increasing costs of farm inputs, water shortages, and new diseases and pests brought on by a changing climate. To deal with these challenges, information has become a critical input to farming operations: faced with rapidly changing conditions, farmers need market information, timely technical advice, and alerts on new and improved techniques. There are currently few sources for reliable, timely knowledge. Television and radio have achieved remarkable penetration in rural areas and stand as an effective means of information dissemination. However, without a platform to discuss, debate, and relate personal experience, information is not actionable.

Social software - email, blogs, wikis, forums, and social networks - has revolutionized how people learn and share expertise on the web, but the Internet and its associated access technologies (broadband connectivity, PCs) are out of reach for much of rural India. Even if Internet-connected PCs were available, widespread usage is constrained by language and literacy barriers. But while computers are unaffordable or unfamiliar to rural communities, mobile phones are not.

Avaaj Otalo is a "voice-based community forum" that connects farmers in Gujarat, India to relevant and timely agricultural information over the phone. Farmers call up a phone number, and then navigate through audio prompted menus to ask questions, listen to answers to similar questions, and listen to archives of a popular radio program for Gujarati farmers. The number farmers can call is toll-free.

Farmers in Gujarat, India. Current pilot is focused on 80 farmers, but expanding to include 50,000 farmers all throughout Gujarat.

First and foremost, Avaaj Otalo has extended a one-way radio broadcast program into a community forum, where users can input questions, and even answer questions from others. DSC records its radio broadcasts offline and sends it to the radio station for broadcast, so a way to input questions was not available before Avaaj Otalo.

Avaaj Otalo's audio portal started with a lot of content--DSC's radio broadcast archives. Neil Patel, developer for Avaaj Otalo thinks this was crucial in building user base, as it provided useful information for initial information--and bootstrapped the availability of informative content on the portal. Being tightly coupled with a radio broadcast also means that as Avaaj Otalo expands, it will have a readily available mouthpiece and advertisement mechanism to grow its user base.

The idea of the community audio forum was also well-liked by farmers. While they often wanted their questions answered by authoritative sources (NGO workers), they liked listening to the questions that other farmers had, and suggestions from these farmers even if the credibility could not automatically be established.

The pilot has gone well. As Avaaj Otalo expands, here are the challenges that will be have to overcome:

• Cost. The service is currently toll-free, and DSC pays for all use of the system. As the system grows, however, this is likely to get expensive and unmaintainable. Moreover, demand is bound to change when cost is introduced. So DSC needs to find an appropriate way to distribute costs among farmers, the telecommunications operators, and itself to achieve sustainability.
• There is also a question of usability as the system and the amount of content grows. As more and more farmers call in, it might become challenging for an individual farmer to listen to his/her question’s answer—he/she would have to wait through all the questions that have been asked more recently—and to find questions that pertain to his locality and growing patterns. Information will need to be categorized and presented in some organized manner.