Access to mobile phones has boomed in Africa in recent years. Communication has expanded for the vast majority of Africans who would have had no prospect of being connected to a fixed phone network. African entrepreneurs all over the continent are using the boom to explore various ways of providing new services to mobile phone users.
A Ghanaian Information Technology expert has introduced Tradenet, a service to provide buyers and sellers of agricultural produce information about market prices by cellphone. It lets
buyers and sellers indicate what they are after and their contact information, which is sent to all relevant subscribers as an SMS text message in one of four languages. Interested parties can then reach others directly to do a deal.
Most farmers sell their goods to wholesalers located near to them. They might get much better prices for their goods selling to customers located elsewhere in the country or the region. But without accurate pricing information, it is difficult for a farmer to invest the money neccesary to take his goods to a faraway market. TradeNet tries to solve this problem by letting farmers and customers post their products and find each other via the web and cellphone Short Message Service.
This sort of system has been tried before with mixed success, largely by NGOs and government-sponsored development projects. For example, Trade at Hand, a project funded by the UN's International Trade Centre in Geneva, provides daily price information for fruit and vegetable exports in Burkina Faso and Mali, with plans to add more countries. And Manobi, a telecoms firmbased in Senegal, providing real-time agricultural and fish prices to fee-paying
subscribers, is also backed by aid money. But TradeNet's approach is unique so far because it collects valuable economic data : names, locations, business interests and telephone numbers. and then sells them to advertisers.
There are huge barriers to success. For instance, while Africa now has 60% mobile coverage across the continent, there are many rural areas where mobiles don’t work.
There could also be a steep learning curve by cellphone users largely accustomed to using the technology for private communication rather than as a source of business information. This would be greatly influenced by the price of the service. Listing offers is free, as is receiving the texts. Tradenet hopes to eventually work out a way for the service to be funded by advertising, making it affordable for the end-user. It hopes the service will become so useful that recipients will eventually want to pay. For the moment, though, the company is busy signing up users and
swallowing the cost of sending the messages.
Transportation in Africa, especially across borders borders, needs major improvement. What this means is that even where the Tradenet service provided information about a distant lucrative market for a farmer, the difficulty and expense of transportation might not make it worthwhile to seek it. It might still be better for the farmer to go for the lower price of the nearby market.
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