The phrase ‘Living under a dollar a day’ has almost become synonymous with living in sub-Sahara Africa. In Kenya for example we hear of the Great Rift which is basically the bread basket of our nation having food crisis annually, yet the salt of the earth farmers toil year round trying to meet their basic needs.

Yet if you look at our export yield it never changes and no one complains that Kenya is not producing enough. The prime reason is lack of Information Access by the rural farmer who basically does not reap what he/she sows.

Another example of inability to make informed decisions is a rabbit rearer. How many people know the market price of rabbits? You will find that a farmer will sell at a sub-standard rate for a well bred animal. How will he know this? From a newspaper? From the radio station?

Kenya is among African states that has seen the phenomenal rise in Mobile Subscription of 24,968,891 people and an estimated Data usage of 10,199,83 people.

How can we leverage this technology to give information to these subscribers who are farmers and have purchased these devices. Pamoja Media was awarded a grant by The Rockefeller Foundation to develop a platform that would create a communication platform for farmers and would use the Web, mobile internet, and java apps.

We have tackled this issue by developing the Ukulima.net platform.

We have created a social network for farmers that allows them to track and connect to networks that they feel they share a common interest with. Why create another social network you ask? First of all, the other social networks do not address the needs of farmers like having a Knowledge Base that consists of content by crowdsourcing through question and answer method. Second, we need to create a simple enough tool that speaks the language of the farmer. Swahili version is one of the initiative we are looking to get Open Source developers onto. Third is where you as a developer can put in the greatest value: Application Development and Core Extension

We have developed the Platform on CodeIgniter which is an Open Source MVC Framework. Given this paradigm, it is easy to work on logic and presentation separately. We have worked on Libraries that conduct all the functions of registering, messaging, updating, commenting and others which means extending the core is as easy as developing custom libraries that we have already set the template for.

For Application Developers we have created an API that allows devs to register and using the oAuth protocols all you need is the key and secret provided to transact between our servers. The API documentation is currently growing with our beta site.

This will give space for all types of apps to be developed from the ubiquitous Android devices to the more trendy iOS devices and Symbian smart phones. Let us tackle the UKULIMA CHALLENGE

RESOURCES:
GitHub Repo of the platform: Ukulima
Beta Site: http://www.ukulima.net/
Dev Resources: http://www.ukulima.net/dev/
API Sign Up: http://www.ukulima.net/developer/
API Documentation: http://www.ukulima.net/developer/wiki/

For any inquiries please email me at comark@pamojamedia.com