E-TIC.net: agriculture and ICTs

The ETIC project aims to provide tools and training components so that small farmers and herders be better able to sell their products.

Through the creation of this portal and a series of training courses for field connectors (youth, women, community radio journalists), the ETIC project aims to provide knowledge relevant for efficient and effective farm management.

At the heart of the project: information and communication technologies (ICT), used through a participatory approach. Building a network in the field of agriculture is also an underlying objective of the project. Thus, field connectors are both actors and intermediaries between farmers and new technologies.

The ETIC project, a multi-actor initiative, is coordinated by ICVolunteers. The project is being implemented in  Senegal and Mali (Sahel Region), with the support of Fonds Francophones des Inforoutes.

We wish to accompany in the development of practices, such as harvesting of market information by sending a member of a village to the market in order to see who sells, stores, transports and buys which goods and who the intermediate traders are. Among the information given: market prices, bids, purchase / sale, weather alerts and other complementary the information.

We wish to set up, through the present project, an SMS subscription service allowing subscribers to obtain valuable information sent by SMS and detailed on the present web platform. This information may be displayed in different ways, among which a laptop used in a public location in villages.

The ultimate aim is to indirectly and directly assist farmers to better negotiate their specific share of sales, ideally doing direct sales with a merchant rather than through rather rather than to deal with multiple middlemen.