As the world innovates governments, communities and management processes at the speed of thought as envisaged by the likes of Bill Gates, as development economists redraw the focus of the wealth of nations from brick and motor possessions to knowledge based specialization, and as we all get confused in our assessment of what constitutes real poverty, one reality comes to mind: that we still have not really identified where actual development and indeed the focus of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) needs to stem from. In my view it needs to stem from the grassroots and not from head offices of national institutions or development thinkers. We need to look at the inverted pyramid without any pretence that management thinkers are known to play. We need to promote the basic definition of wisdom as integrated knowledge - itself an outcome of synthesized information, which we get only when we achieve effective data processing. This article demonstrates the importance of availing the tools of data processing at the point of data generation, or in other words, the need to think of field data capture at the data source point.

What every digitally thinking initiative must address is to seek a solution to meet the elusive goal of a digitally driven sustainable development. In the context of farming, such a solution lies in our ability to identify a solution that enriches the farmer, who without any of his design, and through his toil, creates the rich, and gets no reward for it other than being used more for the rich to extend their alms. The solution is to be found in wondering whether there would be any moral benefit if technology driven development can create a slant in the distribution of the wealth of nations if farm based wealth was shared with a more proportionate  benefit to the person who lives by his sweat, in the farms. This will lead the technology solutions developers and development thinkers to evolve a solution that proportionately rewards the sweating guy, much as the thinking guy also gets a return for his thinking. This can only be addressed and with success if we seriously analyze the agricultural value chain that every farmer lives or interacts with every day of his life and help the farmer tap the opportunities that the value chain presents to him by helping evolve institutional mechanisms that reward all productive activities at their level.

From our assessment that was more heuristic than scientific, we figured that smallholder farmers of tea or milk in East Africa and indeed throughout the world, around the tropics and outside, rely on agriculture as the source of their livelihoods, yet this is the geographical area where poverty is most prevalent, much as it is the most environmentally resource endowed. We also noted that while plantation owners have access to credit to procure the necessary processing lines and to buy the agricultural produce from poor farmers, the poor farmers lack the wherewithal for investment to process their produce; and lack the ability to think of the institutional infrastructure to help them exploit their potential. As you may agree, farmers’ earnings are not always proportionate to what is paid to them by the processors to whom they sell their produce. The processor is normally paid more and can at his whim inflate prices to suit his financial appetite, thereby creating inflation that affects those outside the processing arena. To make matters even worse, the poor farmer normally delivers more produce but the records are falsified by middlemen or intermediaries who collect the produce from farmers, and then deliver or sell whatever they have collected from the farmer to the processors. Unfortunately, the farmer is hostage to this system and has nowhere to take his produce besides to the same unscrupulous clerk or middleman who steals from him with impunity.

When the clerks from procuring intermediaries weigh the produce, they traditionally record a farmer’s delivery on a manual delivery ticket. If we take the case of milk which is our latest sector as a company to focus automation on, an illiterate farmer will lose milk:

• At the weighing point where the scale may be deliberately mis-calibrated, and is always rounded downwards, and

• At the produce delivery transcription level.

This inefficiency and resultant loss of effective weights against which payment is made, is repeated at every transcription point where there are clerks, before the actual final record against which payment is made has been captured. When the organization procuring the produce is a farmer cooperative as happens in the cases we have been dealing with, the managers may know that there is a problem of this nature but they too are held hostage by the clerks and their system of operating.

The challenge lies in the fact that most farmers are illiterate and may not be able to tell when clerks cheat on the reading of the scale or if they transcribe the wrong reading from the scale for their records. Indeed, even when they can read or write, the clerk can choose to take the wrong weight against which the literate farmer may have no recourse. Unfortunately, whatever the error, farmers have nowhere to turn to and are forced to develop some blind faith in the representative of the organization that procures their agricultural produce out of which they get their payment. Otherwise they will not be able to sell to anyone at all! Smallholder farmers may not complain, and when they do, they will not let the fraudulent clerk know in order to avert being blacklisted.

Even when the clerk is honest, the common analog scale normally used by the procuring institutions is calibrated to the nearest 0.5 of a kilogram. This means that in the case where the analog scale is used, clerks still have room to either round the readings downwards or upwards depending on their own whim. At times, records are lost by the farmers so that whatever is finally paid to them may not necessarily be what is due to them but rather what the clerks in the purchasing organization may decide is the correct rounded approximation.

Everything therefore relies on a procurement-payment system that is controlled by people other than the resource owner - the farmer. The extra weighed produce deliveries (derived from the aggregation of rounded readings or deliberate transcription errors) is then transferred through records so that payments are made to a rogue collaborating farmer who in the end oils the chain of thieving clerks, based on whatever may be their agreed formula. Though the farmers and managers in the procuring organization know that this scenario holds, they normally have no way of catching the thieves. Promoting more productivity at the farm level does not help in empowering poor rural communities, where wealth is most needed. And no matter what effort is made, poor rural farmers continue being poor. The process based technology that we evolved addresses this.

Our technology innovation, which is a digital handheld scale, weighs to the closest 0.01 of a kilogram of agricultural produce. Using electronic storage that downloads the data to a centralized database, and linking the scale memory to an electronic load cell, the scale is able to:

• Weigh accurately to the nearest 0.01 of a Kilogram

• Store farmer records in a Read Only Memory

• Get powered through stored-electrical-power to make the scale memory/storage operate away from grid power

• Through the power of a customized firmware designed to mimic the operations of the activities being addressed, automatically capture farmer records and their weighments

• Capture and transfer farmer records on a farmer smartcard that can be used in input stores and retail outlets with credit arrangements with the produce buying institution/cooperative

Interfacing this scale with a computer enables the data from the scale to be transferred to an application that then updates records pertaining to payrolls for farmers and the procuring company’s internal staff. Farmer records are captured into the scale at the beginning of a field activity so that only real and authentic farmers can weigh their produce using the custom digital scale. This then removes the need for manual records and the control that has hitherto been in the hands of clerks that sell excess milk or tea in their own names or jointly with others.

This is then followed by data encryption so that data is not intelligible to the office clerks within the procuring institution. This forestalls any potential for data manipulation through manual effort. Electronic data capture then ensures that the processing of the farmers’ produce deliveries is done and records updated on a daily basis. A portable thermal printer that is strapped on the weighing clerk’s belt allows records that a farmer who needs a printed delivery ticket (a receipt of his milk delivery) to be printed. Data so collected and downloaded into a centralized server makes it available for remote querying by other parties such as the farm owner or management so long as such parties have the necessary authentication. Where the futures price is known, a farmer can take credit based on his produce delivery or obtain credit from a collaborating store using the farmer smartcard.

The above model has been under implementation for the last eight years in one of the dairy smallholder cooperatives, Githunguri Dairy, which started in year 2000 when they could only pay their farmers Ksh. 5,000,000 a month. Today they pay their farmers in excess of Ksh. 120,000,000 a month with an average monthly income of Ksh. 8,500 a farmer, an income that is close the basic salary of a teacher. The impact of this effort has been that the chairman of this cooperative was rewarded in the last general election with a vote to represent the constituency where the cooperative is based. The campaign story was the exemplary leadership that he has demonstrated through his strengthening of income generation ability that the smallholder farming community enjoys. They laud the transparent handling of milk records and payment which we know is associated more with the technology than the man. But indeed it is his far sighted thinking and the desire for an impact that he allowed technology to be tried in a rural area.

Another milestone for this community has been that the farmers have allowed their cooperative to invest the extra earnings, arising from the new found milk-wealth, in their own milk processing plant. This plant has captured the market from leading milk processors in the city of Nairobi in a period of less than five years. The employment generation in the locality can only be assessed by a careful analysis of the dairy value chain which has received enormous growth in the country over the last few years. Other cooperatives are following suit with the Kenya Dairy Board having to call for a national programme to automate milk collection and marketing. Our proposal to replicate this system won a 93% mark on the technical and financial aspects. The implementation phase is now underway.

The success of this grassroots technology initiative has been possible due to the following:

• Partnership: We defined our role as perfecting the dairy products value chain and therefore decided to create partnerships with institutions that helped us define that perspective.

• Reliance on the internet to seek like minded institutions: The electronic scales that we have been partners in reengineering were identified through the Internet. We traded blindly with our Indian manufacturers (Applied Data Logix) for close to eight years before we met in person. All our business was carried out through email with the support of the international financial system, itself a beneficiary of the Internet.

• Research and development collaboration: We have collaborated with research and development institutions to promote institutional focus for identifying approaches that create sustainable community enterprises by using remote data capture solutions.

• Partnership with policy institutions: We partner with the government to promote acceptability of our solutions among smallholder community institutions, and in the process support government initiatives that promote what our technology solutions do. We charge the community institutions for our services rather than seek government aid to finance our initiative. Where the government seeks to develop sustainable programmes at the community level, it adopts our grassroots focus with the confidence that our models work. They seek to work with us or the teams that have been nurtured through us due to the institutional focus of our models. Sustainable wealth creation is achieved and the MDGs are met through the processes that we nurture.

We have evolved the same technology to address non-weighing data capture terminals which can be used to:

• Capture records of rural farmers through smart cards that can integrate with the financial sector payment systems

• Promote Internet usage or linkage to wireless telephony through GPRS, and

• Has sufficient memory to carry emails and relevant e-government records.

Our focus now is to create a centralized data center that supports community initiatives through community telecentres that we have been promoting when the communities use the telecentre for market information. This then promotes a technology research ‘pull’ rather than ‘push’ to communities. We, along with the government in Kenya , are developing a project so that we can proliferate technology-data-centers in the country through the telecenter model. The telecenters will act as the local information hub to be driven by business incubates of our business so that they can offer technology convergence points at the village level. As a starting point, we have conducted training for business service extension workers through a programme that is funded by the World Bank to promote multidisciplinary research commercialization and extension services. The Ministry of Agriculture in Kenya has agreed to house our program in its extensive network of Agricultural Training Centers (ATCs). The ministry and the government shall be free to subsidize the services offered but the privately driven telecenters will act as the support centers to users of our data capture and data processing outfits. This in essence will be a public private partnership that is geared to promoting the creation of wisdom by synthesizing knowledge from the activities people do to create their livelihoods.

For those that need to process their produce so that they can create cottage industries, we have created an initiative for agricultural Value Addition and Cottage Industry Development (VACID) through an NGO called VACID Africa. With a business incubation initiative under our first business (www.willpower.co.ke) and a technology business that adapts technology for development (www.octagon.co.ke), and now with an NGO to help the resource-endowed to get their fair share from the market place under VACID Africa (www.vacidafrica.or.ke), we believe we shall have a solution on what can truly take ICT to the grassroots.

I would urge technology promoters to seek avenues to create community institutions that then use the technology for development rather than decide that existing technologies that may have worked in some other place can be brought home and domesticated. Raw data collection and the eventual processing of the same through locally developed data processing solutions have immense potential for sustainable development through knowledge formation and propagation at the point where such knowledge is most relevant. This will eliminate deciding to use foreign technologies just because they are branded ‘best bet’ technologies in other environments.