Knowing "WhatsApp" With Food Security

This post originally appeared on Feed the Future's Africa Lead project website.

Fredrick Korir is a young extension agent from Bomet County, located in Kenya’s agricultural heartland. Bomet, spanning over 1600 square kilometers, has a diverse landscape featuring lush hills where maize, fruit trees and sweet potatoes grow. It is also home to fields that reach across high plains where wheat flourishes and herds of cattle graze. As one of the county’s ninety agricultural extension workers who interact directly with farmers to improve food security, Fred covers only a fraction of the county but has four hundred farmers and a huge area to cover by foot, bus or motorcycle.

It was the U.S. Government’s global food security and hunger initiative, Feed the Future, that helped Fred devise a plan to use a simple mobile phone app to solve his monumental task.

In 2015 Fred was a recent university graduate and had been out of work for close to two years. That all changed when the Bomet County government decided to hire a new group of youth agriculture extension agents. With the support of USAID/Kenya and implemented by Feed the Future’s continental-wide capacity building program, Africa Lead, these agriculture extension agents were provided the “Champions for Change” leadership training to help boost agricultural extension services in the county. Part of the training focused on strategic planning for and use of information communications technologies (ICT) in extension services.

With Kenya embracing the devolution of government services from the national to county level, each county has had the huge task of quickly creating systems to bring effective development to people at the local level. Initially, Africa Lead, as part of a multi-county training effort, offered the Champions for Change Leadership Training for 60 county officials from various arms of the Bomet County government. In this training, members of the Ministry of Agribusiness created an action plan to hire the 35 youth extension agents who develop action plans in an Africa Lead training, which would later be tied to performance contracts.

Fred, who had received training on e-extension by the Kenyan government in 2012, created a plan to use ICT apps, not only to tell people about the work he was doing, but to improve farmer-to-farmer learning and increase the number of farmers he could reach. Fred first created a chat group of just the farmers he worked with. As it became more popular, he coordinated with his extension colleagues and they decided to form a county wide group called “Real Farmers.” The result has been game changing.

Now about five groups have been created across Bomet’s various WhatsApp groups. Additionally, other County staff use WhatsApp to coordinate efforts, share pictures of issues on farms and link farmers with commercial opportunities.

“The farmers are getting more information faster. As an extension officer, I am able to address several challenges that farmers are facing. We can share experiences. Farmers can share experiences by [sharing] the problems they face to the group and participants can help identify the problem,” says Fred.

Fred estimates that prior to the training he saw four to five farmers per day going personally to their plots. Now, using his phone he can reach about 800 farmers a day instantaneously. He also reaches his various lists of farmers using bulk text messaging offered by Kenya’s Safaricom. The success of Bomet’s new extension agent training and the resulting technology innovations are part of a larger successful relationship between Feed the Future’s Africa Lead program and Bomet County.

Most importantly, from the field to the market, Bomet County is building better and more efficient ways to know "WhatsApp” when it comes to agriculture and food security.