Pausing to take notes during field interviews

I trekked through Ganze for three days this week, stepping outside my role in Procurement and Logistics to translate for Wharton’s visiting research team. During my visits to Ganze I learnt a lot, including the ways in which field staff carry out daily activities to make their work and KOMAZA more successful.

The Facilitators meet with farmers several times a month for training and shamba visits, and they see Field Officers twice a week to discuss farmers’ challenges and how to overcome them. The Facilitators have made their own scheduling tool to help plan farmer visits, which can be adjusted in cases of emergencies.

Farmers in rural Kenya generally don’t follow a set schedule, however. Family, funerals and time-sensitive agricultural activities can draw farmers away from home on the day of a scheduled visit. Given these logistical challenges, the Wharton team asked Facilitators how they ensure farmers are up-to-date with their visits.

One Facilitator named Japheth said that he calls all farmers who have a mobile phone. Many farmers, however, don’t have phones. In these cases, Japheth organizes a way for farmers to receive and deliver information through neighbors who happen to be their friends. Creative problem solving like this is required on a day-to-day basis in the field.

Joseph, a Facilitator, talks with farmer Kanze about the progress of her jatropha farm.

I also learnt how KOMAZA field employees effectively communicate information between their team and nearly 1000 widely disbursed farmers. They pass messages from the office to the field following a top-down communication chain that relies on word-of-mouth and mobile phones. Information flows in a structured way: Headquarters → Field Managers → Field Officers → Facilitators → Farmers. We receive feedback from farmers and field staff through a bottom-up approach by reversing the same chain. This channel of communication ensures that each and every farmer and field employee has a means of voicing their opinion and receiving reliable information.

Farmers’ enthusiastically received Wharton’s research team in one of Kenya’s most remote regions, where foreign guests are rare. A farmer called David even brought out a visitor’s book for everyone to sign, including the KOMAZA Field Officer and Facilitator. Our brief visit has seems to have encouraged farmers to work even harder to make their farms a success.

Kanze Kithi stands with her KOMAZA jatropha. She was so eager to have visitors at her shamba.

Lige, part of Wharton's research team, stands with Joseph and me at the end of a successful day.

Our field research began with a trek through Ganze, shadowing four Facilitators on visits to 22 farms. We then held two days of interviews with more than a dozen Facilitators and three Field Officers. With the aid of our translators – Juliet, Roselyn, Tina and Nancy – we discovered KOMAZA’s many strengths as well as some areas for development.

Walking from farm to farm, we found that Facilitators are knowledgeable about their jobs, follow well-structured farmer visit schedules and respond rapidly to pest issues. We were impressed with the commitment and ingenuity of many Facilitators.

Irene, a Petanguo Facilitator, rolled up her sleeves and showed a new farmer how to pull weeds and mulch, speaking passionately about the importance of these activities for the trees’ health. Japhet, a young Ganze Facilitator with a shy disposition, proactively found cell phone access for his farmers in order to enable communications between his regular shamba visits.

Lige (left) from the Wharton Team interviews Japhet (right), a KOMAZA Facilitator. Juliet (center), KOMAZA's logistics manager, helps with translation.

Some areas of opportunity we identified include:
• Reducing the variability in Facilitators’ days. Depending on bicycle breakdowns and pest spraying, the length of work days can vary by 4 hours or more. Facilitators typically fill extra time with additional shamba visits, but a more regular schedule could result in greater efficiency.
• Developing a visit schedule that is scalable. Facilitators are adamant about visiting all shambas twice per month, but as shambas grow older and stronger they require fewer visits. For KOMAZA to scale, we need an easy-to-understand scheduling system that adjusts for shamba age.
• Developing processes for training, internal communications and performance evaluations. As happens with all start-ups, KOMAZA has reached the size at which it must codify information and processes for efficient practices and internal communications and continued professional development as the organization grows.

KOMAZA has achieved great things, which we were fortunate to see firsthand, and we look forward to brainstorming solutions and leaving behind tools to help KOMAZA in its next stage of growth.

Thanks to the KOMAZA team for welcoming us into the organization and providing the support and resources that have helped us to learn so much, so quickly. We are honored to be a part of your team!

The number of mobile users in Africa is now over 300 million, equivalent to the entire population of the US. The cost of a basic mobile phone plus sim card can be as low as Ksh 1500 or $20. As I realized from staying with a family in Ganze town, Kilifi district, most families own a cell phone, a wildly improbable thing if you consider that they grind their own flour using hand-held stone mills, cook their food over an open fire and live in mud-and-makuti (grass thatch) homes. A cell phone in the hands of a rural Kenyan farmer is a lot more powerful than the computers NASA used to go to the moon in the sixties.

Betty, one of KOMAZA's farmers, answers a call between planting seedlings.

Mobile technology presents a unique opportunity for Africa. We’re talking home-grown solutions that encourage innovation and entrepreneurship. In the near future, KOMAZA hopes to create new opportunities using mobile technology. Our Field Extension Network model – which uses a system of field staff to connect farmers with the KOMAZA office –  is especially suited for a mobile-distributed information gathering system.

We face several unique challenges: we are in a rural part of Kenya with patchy cell service; the literacy level of our farmers is very low; and our farmers are the poorest of the poor, so we are constrained to very basic phone models. In spite of these difficulties, we are excited to produce appropriate technology applications that improve KOMAZA’s service delivery.

Some other organizations doing cool things with mobile technology in Africa:

txteagle: A crowdsourcing idea. Allows anyone with a mobile phone to complete tasks for pay, e.g. translation of phrases into local languages.

questionbox: People in India and Uganda use a public station to call an answer service for free. The person who answers searches the internet for agricultural info on the caller’s behalf.

Frontline SMS: A communication solution for our farmers; we’re investigating its potential as a mapping tool as well.

Ushahidi: An innovative platform that was used to map crisis zones during Kenya’s 2008 election violence; it’s now being used in many other applications.

M-Pesa: A mobile money transfer service by Kenya’s largest cell phone carrier Safaricom. In its third year of implementation, M-Pesa has 7 million subscribers.