What are steps to use say the internet for meeting the educational and health needs of poor female farmers in an isolated rural community?

Answer 1

Farmer organizations can function more efficiently by using ICTs to attract a wider membership and thus generate more funds and provide better services in a virtuous spiral of development. To speed the uptake of ICTs, it may be appropriate for public agencies to provide funds that can overcome the inertia typical of organizations struggling on a shoestring budget. Supporting a pilot project to demonstrate benefits can be effective. Indeed, many examples in this module are relatively small-scale interventions that succeeded in changing the way farmer organizations operate. The challenge in most cases, however, is to sustain the use of ICTs after the period of support. Costs are associated with change, not only equipment costs but also the costs of maintenance, training, and continuing development. New technology must either generate enough extra income for an organization to cover ongoing costs, or individual users must see enough tangible benefits in order to pay for the technology. In the developing world, and particularly in agriculture, subject as it is to the external shocks of unpredictable weather and global market forces, the benefits of ICTs must be very firmly established for farmer organizations to sustain their costs. One way of looking at the sustainability issue is to regard well-functioning farmer organizations as a public good that merits support from public funds, at least initially. Given the vital role of such organizations in helping impoverished farmers improve their living standards in areas that may be poorly reached by other interventions, this argument is powerful. Public-private partnerships are also important, as developments in ICT come largely from the private sector. Dealing with such partnerships will be a critical issue. Private companies need to make a profit for their goods and services, but safeguards need to be built into partnership arrangements so that the farmer organizations (and ultimately their members) see long-term benefits. Where support is offered to farmer organizations that have not yet reached a level of financial maturity that would allow them to adopt ICTs independently, it is important to design interventions that give due consideration to the issue of gender. Women need to be involved at the planning stage as well as in the management of a project to ensure their proper representation (box 8.1 lists obstacles to increasing women's use of ICTs). Somewhat paradoxically, women, despite having lower social visibility and literacy than men, have more to gain from ICTs. Women may not be able to free themselves from their traditional time-consuming commitments to household and children, but armed with only a cheap mobile phone they can find the best prices for their crops without abandoning their domestic tasks. Women who might already be involved in the accounting function of a farmer cooperative should have the opportunity to learn computer skills when these functions become computerized. Such skills will become more valuable as computerization becomes more common, giving women more employment choices. Factors that Can Hamper Women's Uptake of ICTs � Cultural attitudes discriminate against women's access to technology and technology education: What would a woman farmer want with a computer? � Compared to men, rural women are less likely to own communication assets, such as a radio or mobile phone. � Rural women are less likely to allocate their income to use in public communications facilities, except when they need to communicate with family or to arrange for income transfers. � Rural women are often reluctant to visit cyber cafés or public internet centers, which are often owned by men and visited by men. The café culture often excludes girls and women. � Rural women's multiple roles and heavy domestic responsibilities limit the time they can allocate to learning and using ICTs, until and unless they realize the potential information benefits (and time-saving elements) of using these technologies.