GenARDIS grantees: Women teachers have a role to play in rural communities in Nigeria

Olanla village is an agrarian community in Nigeria. GenARDIS grantee Information Development Network (I-DevNet) is planning to train women teachers, the literate people in the village, on how to use internet and mobile phones to make things work better for everyone involved, especially women farmers, who are the most vulnerable group of the process. Williams Nwagwu, information scientist, university teacher and civil society activist, is coordinating this project.

The community

Olanla village is an agrarian community in Oyo State in Southwestern Nigeria that is inhabited mainly by illiterate women, except for the primary school teachers, who are indigenous by either birth or marriage. Agricultural products grown in the community are mainly cassava and yams – fragile food items – which are also the staple in the region. Bulk buyers, retailers and traders often come from the city to buy these goods.

I-DevNet’s preliminary investigation shows that everyone in the agribusiness chain in this community is unhappy, and everyone is also complaining. The farmers complain that they earn less than they deserve because their goods are sold off at cheaper prices than they are found in the cities. The bulk buyers complain that sometimes, they meet the goods almost damaged, and run some losses when the goods are not transported on time, or sold out quickly. The transporters complain that sometimes, they make futile visits to the community when their speculation about the visits of the bulk buyers fails. Hence, everyone is losing something in the form of time, quality of goods, money, and so on, and this problem arises because there is no linkage of all the elements in the chain so that they may communicate among themselves. This situation is amplified by the illiteracy of the key actors – the farmers. This has implications such as language difficulties, and difficulty acquiring basic ICT skills. But there exist women primary school teachers in the community, and this privilege could be harnessed to leverage the challenges faced by agribusiness in this community. A training on computer/internet and mobile phone use could enable them to create a self-manageable network of all the elements in the agribusiness in the community.

What can ICTs do?

The major objective of the project is to build and use the ICT capacity of female rural primary school teachers to create a computer/internet and mobile phone-based market information exchange network among rural women farmers, bulk buyers, transporters, traders and retailers of agricultural produce in the Olanla community. Through ICTs, teachers will develop a database of buyers, traders and transporters of the agricultural produce, which will enable them to be informed mediators in the process. The ultimate outcomes will be increased income for the rural women, a solid community agribusiness network, and reduced risks of speculative buying by customers.

What are the gender and ICT issues at stake?

As is common with most people in southwestern Nigeria, the rural communities are inhabited mainly by women; an observation that partly explains the predominantly large number of women in Olanla. In the current pervasive gender imbalance in access to power and resources, the relative absence of men might explain why Olanla community lacks any physical development, as well as why there is a high level of poverty among the women. A major visible source of income to the women farmers is their agricultural products, from which they maintain themselves and the large number of children we saw in the community.

The women display and sit around their wares on the roadside stalls and wait for retailers, traders, transporters and buyers who usually come from the city. Unpredictable urban social conditions in the present political era in Nigeria, coupled with poor infrastructure and other unknown factors sometimes keep the women waiting hours on end, while the products spoil due to their fragility and the lack of storage mechanisms. If the expected customers ever come, the goods are sold off at very cheap prices when compared to the prices of the same goods less than a 45-minute drive away. Hence, the women invest their energy in planting, caring for, harvesting and selling their crops, but often reap less than they deserve.

Due to the proximity of the community to the city, telecommunication signals of all the major available networks in Nigeria are clearly received in the community and some of the women teachers have and use mobile phones. On the parts of both the teachers and the farmers, there is no consciousness about the possibility of deploying ICTs, or enrolling the women teachers as change agents in creating a liaison between the farmers and their customers. An ordinary list containing basic data about the various stakeholders, and a dissemination of information about available products to these stakeholders through the internet and mobile phones are all that would be required to increase the bargaining power of the rural women, enhance their income, and reduce bulk buyers’ risks of buying damaged goods, as well help transporters maximize the use of their resources.

With easy to use and free Ubuntu-philosophy resources, open access software facilities will be deployed to interlink farmers with their customers in the internet, with the literate teachers acting as intermediaries. A blog, maintained by the project manager, will be used to document the routine activities, as well as problems and the progress of the project. Beyond text blogging, vlogging, a voice counterpart, will be deployed to document the experiences of most significant experiences, to cover monitoring and evaluation activities of the project.