Project smartphones

In late October 2019 we received a small grant to purchase 115 smartphones and an equal number of protective cases, screen protectors, and micro SD cards. . We proposed the phones be used by clusters of farmers who are participating in the research to share pictures, short videos clips, etc., via WhatsApp and to watch farmer-to-farmer videos that are loaded onto the SD cards.

Can smartphones enhance social learning among farmers?

In our proposal, we hypothesized that smartphones could potentially help stimulate greater social learning among farmers by

• Providing farmers with the means to share their observations, experiences, and conclusions with the other farmers elsewhere who are also doing the same research.
• Discussing and reflecting on the cluster’s experiences in order to decide what they want to share with the other farmers outside the group. The very process of deliberately reflecting on and discussing  what the cluster members are learning from their individual experiments should enhance farmer learning.
• Discussing what they learned from other participating farmers submissions and/or the videos loaded onto the SD cards ( The phones were pre-loaded with the complete set of Kiswahili language videos from Access Agriculture: https://www.accessagriculture.org/).
• Using the phones to search for relevant agricultural information on the internet.

Additional hypothesis

We hypothesize that, initially, there may be more social learning happening between clusters of farmers who are served by the same organization. They may already know one another and may be more likely to share the same socioecological context. We further hypothesize that there will be more cross-country and cross-regional learning that takes place after participating farmers visit one another on field visits.