Why Don't Farmers Use Cell Phones to Access Market Prices? Technology Affordances and Barriers to Market Information Services Adoption in Rural Kenya

Abstract

Providing smallholder farmers with agricultural information could improve economic development, by helping them to grow more crops, which they could then sell for more money. Widespread mobile phone ownership in Africa means that, for the first time, there is a realistic opportunity to deliver pertinent information to remote farmers throughout the continent. Efforts to harness the potential of mobile phones include the development of agricultural market information services (MIS) – applications that send farmers crop pricing information via short message service or SMS. These services promote economic development among some farmers in the developing world, but not yet in rural Kenya. To understand what factors impede the adoption of these services, we qualitatively studied Kenyan farmers’ mobile phone usage patterns and their interactions with MFarm, a commercially available MIS. Using affordance theory to guide our analysis, we discovered a mismatch between the design of MIS and smallholder farmers’ perceptions of their mobile phones’ communication capabilities. We use these findings to motivate a design agenda that encourages software developers and development practitioners to adopt an ecological perspective when creating mobile applications for sub-Saharan Africa's rural farmers. Strategies for implementing this approach include reconsidering the design of mobile phones, and developing innovative educational interventions.

Keywords:

• human–computer interaction
• market information services
• affordance theory
• agriculture
• rural
• Kenya

Acknowledgements

We thank the editors, reviewers and Shana Ponelis for helpful comments on previous versions of the paper. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the US Agency for International Development. We are also grateful to our research assistants Nightingale Simiyu, Willis Okumu, Dominic Nangea and our colleagues at the Animal Draft Power Program, One Acre Fund, and IPA for helping us to organize the farmers interviewed in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Susan Wyche, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor. Her research focuses on human computer interaction and information and communication technologies and development.

Charles Steinfield is professor in the Department of Media and Information at Michigan State University. His research focuses on the organizational and social impacts of new communication technologies.

ORCID

Susan Wyche http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6151-2913

Charles Steinfield http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2579-755X

Notes

1. As of 2013, under the Constitution of Kenya, the country's eight provinces were subdivided into districts.

2. All participants’ names have been replaced with pseudonyms to preserve their anonymity.

Additional information

Funding

This publication was made possible through support provided by the Global Center for Food Systems Innovation at Michigan State University, which is funded by the Higher Education Solutions Network of the US Global Development Lab, US Agency for International Development, under the terms of Agreement No. AID-OAA-A-13-00006.