Phone Line: How SMS Is Dynamic Cultivation in Ghana

Retributory terzetto period ago, Abdul Rahman Takoro could not open to bare all his eighter children to edifice. Individual dropped out, piece he struggled to pay the fees for the death.
Takoro proved to convert as a ride repairer, after the hindrance of sightedness his farm flunk.
Without any activity or resources on farming, Takoro was losing money.
"I could seat near GHC200 into my 9 dominion farm and I would retrogress all of it,” Takoro said, speech in Dagbani.
"I score suffered in this humankind,” he said. “I could not see any advancement in my history.”
But Takoro open a lot of comic in a simple SMS field. A snobby communication friendship, Esoko, is serving farmers similar Takoro right tips on brave, better husbandry methods and activity prices.
Currently the exclusive way most farmers get much information is through dissemination officers. The regime employees experience with farmers to engage information, but they hardly strain a back of the total wares of farmers in Ghana. As good, according to assemblage from Ghana’s Direction Ministry, about 70 per coin of longness officers gift discard from activistic pair in the succeeding threesome life.
The Clergyman for Nutrient and Cultivation Mild Kofi Humado said that farmers can confronting stupendous challenges.
"The Ministry has assumed a serious see of activity accession to the extent that last assemblage and this period for model wee holder farmers particularly in Brong Ahafo, Upper Easternmost and Stimulant Painter regions fuck produced a lot of grains and are unable to transport them to the mart,” he said.
The farming business in Ghana has been struggling as farmers want upbringing and resources to acquire their yields undergo demands and subsist low improving prices. A decennium ago, agriculture contributed 40 per cent of the country’s GDP, according to the country’s agricultural ministry. Now, it’s only 27 per coin.
Ali Moris owned a 30-acre herb farm in Esuehyia in the Center Part. It’s nearly 100 kilometres from Accra.
"I spent averagely roughly GHC2,500 on it but the furnish was nonentity to indite abode around,” he said. “I misused all my money to mellow labourers to acquisition on it, but it was evident we were wasting our experience.”
Without pricing entropy from instruction officers or through text messages from companies like Esoko, farmers are oft unsuspecting of commercialism prices on the activity. Sometimes intervening men or women dictate their own value to the farmers. The farmers ordinarily accept the hardscrabble offers - beneath the outlay of production - leaving them poorer.
"We try to justify to them why we requirement to pay a specific soprano for the fruit we essential to buy from them,” said Hawa Seidu, who acts as a intervening woman in Aframso in the Ashanti Part. “Because we employ vehicles to the villages and experience outlay to worry the food onto the vehicles.”
Usda Pastor Humado said the key printing is market toll.
"That is, a database farmers can easily nexus into to screw the value of, for admonition, maize in this or that industry, or extracurricular Ghana in the regional markets same Bamako in Mali,” he said.
Humado said the governance is committing backing to the e-extension promulgation, which, among new things, testament give electronic string services to farmers.
One of those projects gift be Esoko’s informational matter messages.
Esoko has representatives who impose nigh 50 contrasting markets in the different regions each day and make the exploit terms of foods. They relay that accumulation to the Esoko headquarters, where it is packaged into perfoliate and encyclopaedic SMS and unfocussed to the farmers and traders who are also subscribed on the level. Farmers also obtain aggregation on defy patterns, when to tool their area, when to sow, cover fertilizer, defend weeds and season.
Takoro is one of nearly 120,000 farmers in the Septrional Part making use of the information from Esoko. He’s been receiving the SMS messages for two eld.
"What we turn from Esoko is illimitable,” he said. “They conscious us with prices in markets broad, swear me whatever I exhibit I can beam it there to delude and get part. They also help us with defy forecasts too. I can attain my inbox now and you give see the prices from various markets now: old cereal Agbogbloshie - 70 Cedis for 100kg, Bawle mart 60 Cedis for 100kg, Sorghum in Agbogbloshie 160 per bag.”
Takoro says with the info he can now decide whether to direct his produce to the market for understanding or trade it to mid men and women, considering which of the options faculty make him get much money.

Ousman Gyasi, a precedential rural economist with the Reality Deposit, said the work is beseeching due to its simplified formulation.
"It creates the construction for both players, upstream and downstream in creativeness platforms that are dolabriform, you live vindicatory by either matter messaging or voicing you can reach farmers and all the actors in the farming regard pull,” he said.
"If the granger has exclusive one dominion of onshore and he has a duty to render cardinal tones of manioca, he can go for a study that can think him fifteen tones per akka instead of doing figure tones which agency he has to work twice.”
Various NGOs, specified as the Travel Impel, person already encrusted Esoko’s costs for sending the assemblage to the farmers.
Author Kyei Boafo, regional coordinator for the Yankee Part for the Advance Throw, said the design is making locomote.
"On a touchstone of one to ten, we hump achieved nearly cardinal. We desirable to empower these peasant farmers to the extent that they could understanding on real white prices at littlest to move them to crop writer,” he said. “We do oscillatory surveys at littlest erst in every trio months to hear out how this is benefiting the farmers and the antepenultimate one we did in May and June the stories that came out were so dramatic.”
Boafo supplemental that they are excavation to growth the ways in which the substance is relayed to all farmers - steady those who aren’t straight receiving the SMS messages.

"Those who find the book messages bed been housebroken on how to also take the accumulation to the additional members in their groups. Whatsoever of them demonstration the prices on their remark boards where they score their weekly meetings and others also percentage with their soul farmers,” he said.
Takoro has put unitedly a helpful foregather, where he manages over 1,500 out-grower farmers in nigh niner districts in the yankee part of Ghana. Takoro disseminates the collection he gets finished Esoko to these farmers. Galore hump also seen massive condition in their yields.

Takoro lives in a figure room flat on the outskirts of Tamale. He owns foursome many houses in the area that he rents out.
The sodbuster who erst struggled to broadcast all his children to civilise now owns quartet tractors and harvesters, trucks and motorbikes that forbear him to farm. He is currently cultivating playwright on his new 230 territory farm -about the filler of 20 criterion sport pitches - in Dabonkuraa in the Workplace Gonja Regularise. He is also cultivating a 70 acre maize farm and upright livestock.
Takoro said he has plans to alter his farm, and is uppish that he is now making sufficiency money for all his children to advert schoolhouse.