This document discusses using information and communication technologies (ICTs) to enhance agricultural development in rural Pakistan. It notes that while mobile phone access is widespread, phones are primarily personal devices not used for business. Literacy levels are low so ICT solutions should leverage visuals like pictures and videos. Regional differences require flexible, non-uniform approaches. Augmented reality shows promise but applications must be simple initially. The Freedom Phone and Farmphone systems enable voice-based group communication. The "Seeing is Believing" app facilitates accessing agricultural extension materials via iPad. The author advocates participatory, context-specific design of ICT solutions to ensure usefulness and use. Technologies should augment rather than replace existing systems and relationships. Both benefits

1. “Learning in the cloud, feet in the village”
Professor Robert Fitzgerald
ASLP2 - Agriculture Sector Linkages Program in Pakistan (Phase
2)

3. Social research objectives
1. To engage the poor and marginalized groups that
can potentially benefit from participating in the
selected value chains of ASLP2
2. To enhance collaboration across project teams
3. To assess and enhance information and
communication modalities and technologies for
collaboration and value chain enhancement
4. To foster effective collaborative development in
rural Pakistan

4. Baseline Survey: Implications
• Good access to mobile phones but they are
personal not business devices
• Limited use of SMS, mainly for recreation.
• Limited access to computers and internet
• Low literacy levels - consider the demonstration
effect – pictures & videos to tell a story
• Regional differences, no one size solution will fit all
• Consider different approaches, modalities and
technologies
• Need to address different languages: English, Urdu
and Sindhi

5. tools to think with
...focus our attention, not
narrow our focus
http://www.ideo.com
http://www.tpck.org

6. ICT4D
• Augment - increase the size, amount or
value of something
• From passive to active
• Multi modal, multimedia, multi-user
• Addressing diversity – literacy and
language
• From problem solving to problem design
• AR - beginning with simple marker-based
projects e.g. labels, images, packing

7. AR – but just one view
Santana-Fernández, J.; Gómez-Gil, J.; Del-Pozo-San-Cirilo, L. Design and
Implementation of a GPS Guidance System for Agricultural Tractors Using
Augmented Reality Technology. Sensors 2010, 10, 10435-10447.

8. Robust but lite AR
• Life is a bit messier where we work
• Wide range of users
• Wide range of mobile technologies
• Limited internet connectivity – but
expanding
• Connect up and integrate existing work

9. Freedom Fone

10. Farmphone configuration
Up to four concurrent users
Prepaid sim cards
2N Office Route
GSM SIP Gateway

11. “Seeing is Believing” (SIB)
app
• SIB is an iPad app linked to a web database that
allows extension workers to quickly locate and
present high quality extension material
• SIB is based on the following principles:
– Applying research methodologies to application,
design and replication
– Best practice in extension of agricultural research
methodologies
– A review and evaluation cycle

12. SIB interface

13. Sample search results for “mango”

14. Example: A presentation assembled “on the
fly” from four video resources located in the
data base

15. Approach: Users in context
• Our approach to exploring possible applications of low-cost
ICTs is participatory – we use the same basic participatory
approach as we do in our research – to ensure the technology
is useful and used
• We focus on flexible, two-way communication systems that
can be adapted by different communities of users to meet
their particular information and communication needs
• Developing more complex and nuanced understandings of
how ICTs work to reconfigure social relationships and
networks will allow us to move beyond simple technical
impact studies and understand the device in context
• Question everything!

16. Neil Postman
“Anyone who has studied the history of technology knows
that technological change is always a Faustian bargain:
Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not
always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes
creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more
than it creates. But it is never one-sided.”

17. Six “design” questions (Postman)
What is the problem to which this technology is the solution
Whose problem is it
Which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a
technological solution
What new problems might be created because we have solved this
problem
What sort of people and institutions might acquire special economic and
political power because of technological change
What changes in language are being enforced by new technologies, and
what is being gained and lost by such changes