The difference a CKW makes

Lydia Namubiru is a Partnership Analyst working with Grameen Foundation’s Community Knowledge Worker program in Uganda.

Charles Mukonyi

For a long time, Charles Mukonyi of Gamatui parish in Kapchorwa had a problem with his chickens – the hens died off soon after hatching new ones. Three months ago, he was visited by his neighbor Tabitha Salimo, a Community Knowledge Worker (CKW) who told him that she had a phone that has huge amounts of agricultural knowledge to answer many of the problems farmers face. Naturally, the first thing Charles asked about was the hen problem. Tabitha checked her phone and informed Charles that his hens were likely to be catching diseases from their predecessors by sitting on the same hay when incubating eggs. She advised him change the hay for every newly incubating hen. He saw the wisdom of that and adopted the practice. He has not lost a hen since!

Around the same time, in Kapwata parish, about 60km away from Charles’ home into the slopes of mountain Elgon, another farmer faced a big loss. One of Saulo Mwanga’s goats developed a disease he had not seen before — boils on the skin. He feared he would lose it. This was a very unfortunate possibility because, as he says, “when you lose one goat, you have lost about sh100,000” (or $50). Fortunately, he had an idea about where he could get help. He had been consulting Alfred Chepsikor, his area’s CKW, for routine farming information such as market prices and weather forecasts. He knew Alfred might have an answer for the goat problem, and indeed he did.

Chepsikor searched his phone and saw the same symptoms described in a piece of informa­tion about goat diseases. Accompanying the symptoms’ description was a sugges­tion on what drugs the farmer could use to treat the goat. Though neither of the farmers knew the drug, they wrote it down on a piece of paper that Mwanga brought to his local agricultural input stores. Mwanga even went across the border to nearby Kenya to find the drug he had been advised to use. The goat is completely healed now.

Caroline Chelangat with her children

As one traverses Kapchorwa, one finds many more success sto­ries, big and small. For Caroline Chelangat of Sipi, it was a tip to add aloe vera to the water for her chickens that saved 10 of out of her flock of 20. (Unfortunately, by the time she consulted with the CKW, she already had lost the first 10). Aloe vera is known to have a medicinal properties, including improving immunity to diseases. Albert Kibet, also of Kapkwata, is hoping for better banana and cof­fee harvests this year after he started adding compost manure to his plantation, on the advice of his CKW.

Asked what he would have done had the CKW information resource not existed, Mwanga says he would have just tried to guess at a solution. After all, he lives 47 kilometers uphill and away from the Kap­chorwa, the nearest township, where one might expect to run into an agriculturalist of any expertise. Looking at a slowly recovering coffee plant that he had sprayed against insects with a drug advised by his CKW, Mwanga says, “I might even have sprayed the plant with a drug left over from spraying the cows, just to try [a solu­tion]. If you are lucky, it works. Otherwise, you just lose it.”

This is the difference a CKW makes — where farmers depended on luck in the past, they now have access to scientifically tried, proven and recommended solutions.

Lessons Learned from AppLab’s First Three Years in Uganda

Eric Cantor has led Grameen Foundation’s AppLab efforts in Uganda for the past three years, and continues to serve as an advisor on the project.

More than three years ago, I landed in Uganda to establish Grameen Foundation’s “Application Laboratory” – a program conceived to explore the potential of mobile phones to improve the lives of the poor.  In our quest to test, develop and expand mobile services that are useful for the most often-ignored people on the planet, our team spent (and spends) extensive time talking to our users, in the places they work and live, to hear about the good and the bad of the methods we are testing to empower them.

We sit under the mango tree at the rural health clinic, hearing about how people learn to avoid and treat common and devastating diseases like malaria and HIV.  We walk the banana plantations of farmers in the West, trying to gauge how they can best control banana wilt, using locally available resources and techniques.  We observe the effects of the rapidly growing “mobile money” phenomenon – essentially digital currency delivered through a mobile phone network – and assess how it can improve the lives of villagers.  We see how people interact with the Internet and other unfamiliar services available through the few laptops and smartphones in a community.  And we listen to farming groups, led by Community Knowledge Workers (CKWs), as they plan and prepare to bulk their crops for sale to the highest-paying buyers.  As white winter washes over the US, and the rains wind down and planting season approaches in Uganda, we share some lessons learned through this work in the hopes that our growing body of work, as well as that of other practitioners in this field, will benefit.

In AppLab’s early work, we tested a number of information services, leading up to our launch, with MTN (one of the primary mobile phone services providers in east Africa) and Google, of Google SMS Tips, the product that won the award for “Best use of Mobile for Social and Economic Development” at the 2010 GSM Mobile World Congress.  It was rewarding to sit on a farm and hear how making organic pesticides using local chemicals or even waste products found on the farm helped save a farmer money, and increase her yields and incomes.

Community Knowledge Workers act as valuable local intermediaries, bridging the "last kilometer" to bring essential information to other rural farmers in Uganda. Here, a CKW uses her high-end mobile phone to check for information on banana wilt.

But what became quickly apparent was that information alone is not a complete solution.  A reference pointer or a tip about maternal health techniques may be useful to an expectant mother, but creating deep, impactful behavior change – what information-driven development initiatives seek – requires a context in which that information has a value. People certainly have a hunger for knowledge and a willingness to embrace the mobile phone to search for answers, as shown by all the questions they asked from the beginning about family planning, and HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, which affect them directly and for which few reliable, anonymous sources are available.  But we require several things to make this information actionable and impactful: specific information, a context in which to make it useful, and relevant services and resources.