Although subsistence farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa are accessing a shifting mobile phone landscape ranging from feature phones to smartphones, they face challenges connecting with a robust network of agricultural contacts.

My research in this area has explored:

  • the design and deployment of an agricultural directory of 10,000 businesses accessible to over 2,000 subsistance farmers through feature phones and smartphones. In collaboration with researchers at Cornell University, I surveyed 1014 agricultural households in Kagera to understand technology access, use, and comfort. We develop and deployed eKichabi v2, a searchable, lightweight, offline directory of agriculture-related enterprises accessible via USSD and Android. To bridge the gap in affordances between the two apps, we pilot the use of mobile money agents as intermediators to support low-comfort users. We identify the advantages, obstacles, and critical considerations in the design, implementation, and scalability of agricultural information systems tailored to both feature phone and smartphone users in Sub-Saharan Africa. More details can be found in our publication in CHI ‘23.

  • how to keep this sort of agricultural ICT afloat in rural Tanzania through employing intermediaries. In order for a technology like eKichabi v2 to help the most marginalized farmers, we need to create a supporting human infrastructure to help them use the technology. During our deployment of eKichabi v2, we discovered that Tanzanian mobile money agents, who played a crucial role in helping rural people onboard onto digital financial service (DFS) platforms, are increasingly unable to sustain themselves financially using their intermediation skills. We conducted focus groups with these agents to explore their willingness to extend their intermediation services to technologies beyond DFS. Our focus groups revealed that Tanzanian farmers face ongoing challenges with new tools, and would benefit from intermediation, while agents encounter mounting financial instability and are thus receptive to learning and providing intermediation for new tools using their trusted positions in the community. We present factors that influence the broadening of the agents’ role into general intermediaries in our paper in ACM Computation in Sustainable Societies ‘23.

  • how local entrepreneurs leverage smartphones and featurephones to run full-mobile businesses through WhatsApp. In our interactions with farmers, we found a large number of periurban Tanzanian people owning smartphone-based micro and small enterprises. We conducted surveys and focus groups with 46 such entrepreneurs, shedding light on the internal mechanisms and external networks of their businesses. We uncovered the new trust dynamics encountered in online interactions, the gendered aspects of this emerging business model, and the means through which people with low capital are reclaiming economic empowerment through entrepreneurship in our publication in CHI ‘23.

Overall, I have built expertise designing, developing, and deploying ICTs at scale that can readily support all farmers while sustainably integrating into the local economy.