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Beyond Market Prices

mobile phones in trade and livelihood activities – Ghana, Uganda, India, China

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What do RCTs of Market Information Systems actually evaluate?

Posted on June 1, 2015 by Jenna Burrell

There are now quite a number of experimental designs and RCTs (randomized controlled trials) of market information systems measuring revenue gained by rural agriculturalists (farmers, fishermen) and traders. While some show improvements to the prices farmers get for their crops, others disappointingly show a lack of impact. There are also studies of agricultural extension services delivered via mobile phone which suggest that crop productivity is boosted by such services. How might these studies guide what actions are taken (i.e. to provide such services) in the real world?

What is ‘ecological validity?’ It is the relationship between controlled, or lab-based experiments and what unfolds in a non-lab, non-controlled environment (aka the ‘real world’). Out in the world multiple variables interact in different ways. So what can we take away as actionable from an RCT that shows a market information system has resulted in boosted revenues for farmers who used it? How do we reconcile the successes with similarly designed studies that showed a failure of impact?

Recent RCTs of MIS have been designed to provide the ideal circumstances for their success. They do so in the following ways:

1) providing the service for free [see Cole and Fernando 2014, Fafchamps and Minten 2012, Nakasone 2013, Hildebrandt et al. 2013]

2) automatically enrolling farmers and pre-customizing information delivery [Nakasone 2013]

3) providing extensive training on the use of the system to overcome literacy limitations [Hildebrandt 2011]

Why do they do this? Because these studies intend to show what impact information (in isolation from other issues) has on markets, farmer profits, and revenues. That does NOT quite make these studies true evaluations of a particular system in real-world use.

So what does this mean for the real-world use of MIS systems such as Esoko, Reuters Market Light, etc?

For item (1) it means that a successful business model will most likely require that it be provided for free, (at least in the short to medium term) if it is to yield the effects measured by recent studies.

For (2) and (3) it means that service adoption and literacy issues remain significant and substantial barriers. Artificially eliminating them for the purpose of an RCT is problematic because it obscures this fact. Fortunately, many programs in this space are finally becoming more attuned to this reality and offering such services through more user-friendly and accessible IVR or call center models (as Esoko now does). For more literacy-demanding services, training (or infomediaries) will be needed. Where training is needed, the scalability of such services is an issue.

Susan Wyche and Chip Steinfield have a paper that’s just come out evaluating the user interface issues around MIS. They look at the affordances of such services and the challenges they pose for farmers. By contrast, RCTs championed by economists fail to address usability and literacy issues when they treat ‘information’ as the only important variable to isolate. It will likely require more interest and support for researchers with different kinds of training (HCI, social science) to make sure this important issue is not trivialized.

Bibliography:

Cole and Fernando (2014) ‘The Value of Advice: Evidence from the Adoption of Agricultural Practices‘ Harvard Business School Working Paper.

Fafchamps and Minten (2012) Impact of SMS-Based Agricultural Information on Indian Farmers. The World Bank Economic Review.

Nakasone, Eduardo (2013) The Role of Price Information in Agricultural Markets: Experimental Evidence from Rural Peru. Selected Paper prepared for presentation at the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association’s 2013 AAEA & CAES Joint Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, August 4-6, 2013.

Hildebrandt, N. (2011). Teach a Man to Text. Esoko, Insights from the Field.

Hildebrandt, N., Y. Nyarko, Romagnoli, and Soldani (2013). Market Information Systems for Rural Farmers: Evaluation of ESOKO MIS – Year 1 Results. New York University: Africa House Blog.

Wyche, S. and C. Steinfield (2015). Why Don’t Farmers Use Cell Phones to Access Market Prices? Technology Affordances and Barriers to Market Information Services Adoption in Rural Kenya. Information Technology for Development

The ‘Myth of Market Price Information’ at the CRS ICT4D conference

Posted on May 27, 2015 by Jenna Burrell

A warm welcome to visitors who’ve found their way to this page from the Catholic Relief Services ICT4D conference.

To know more about the objectives of this 5+ year research project visit our about page.

If you are involved in an ICT4D project in the domain of agricultural, markets, and trade please visit our projects page to see if it is listed.

If your project isn’t listed let us know (or post a comment below) and we’ll add it to our listings!

A very small selection of hundreds of interviews with farmers, fishermen, traders, and others have been written up as profiles. Read these to get a richer sense of how ‘the poor’ and the ‘non-affluent’ manage, survive, and thrive with mobile phones in hand.

For a more in-depth treatment of these topics, visit the publications page. In particular see our working paper titled ‘The Myth of Market Price Information.’

Chris Foster on ‘Thinking about market information systems’ in Rwanda’s tea sector

Posted on May 20, 2015 by Jenna Burrell

Reposting this entry from The Connectivity, Inclusion, and Inequality Group blog at the Oxford Internet Institute. (see the original post here and download the full report on connectivity and the tea sector in Rwanda)

by Chris Foster

Market information systems are growing in popularity as an intervention by governments, NGOs and private firms alike. New information provision for farmers, often price infromation over mobile, have been touted as a way of helping farmers improve the price they get for their produce, and reduce their dependency on middlemen. In our research we explored the impacts of connectivity in the tea sector in Rwanda, and we spent much time mapping the actors, information flows and relations that gave us critical insight into the potentials and limitations of market information systems.

What determines price?

Before we come onto talk about market information systems, I want to talk about ‘price’ and I want to problematize the assumption that the low prices that smallholders receive are the result of a ‘lack of information’. Let’s look at the tea sector in Rwanda. In Rwanda it is only recently that smallholder farmers have been paid based upon a market price (as opposed to a flat government-set rate). So, the tea sector provides us with an interesting natural experiment to observe what happens when smallholders are exposed to market prices – do they seek out and use information and knowledge to improve prices?

Not really! In fact we found little evidence in our research that new price-based trading changed farmer’s behaviour. Quality (and hence price of tea) is not really determined by elements that the farmer could influence. Price is more linked to international market fluctuations and to ‘natural’ endowments (location, soil quality, climate). For farmers who looked to increase quantity, the nature of land sub-division in Rwanda means that it is difficult for smallholders to greatly increase yields and new techniques, fertilisers and irrigation are rarely designed for smallholders. Finally, there is little room for smallholder to choose or skip intermediaries – tea leaf from smallholders needs to quickly be processed, so farmers have little choice about which processor they sell to. It has to be the nearest one.

Market information

Even with the above reservations, we explored if smallholders might have some ability to improve their prices through information and knowledge. What types of market information are available and how are they used in the tea sector in Rwanda?

There have been some sectoral efforts to disseminate price information in tea, and there is a price information system available. This market information system was supposedly accessible for tea co-operative associations (which all smallholders are a member of), but when we interviewed co-operatives there was an inconsistency in knowledge of the system: some co-ops had access, but some co-ops didn’t know the system existed, still others used other relationships to find out about price. In short, our feeling was that it was difficult for co-ops and smallholders to trust price information, and how they might use this to improve was unclear.

Social factors

There were also a number of other social factors that meant that efforts to improve tea through market information had been less than successful. The demographics of tea smallholders in Rwanda does not favour innovation. Agriculture in general, and specifically tea is not seen positively, and the backbreaking work of sowing, weeding and harvesting tea is not one to attract dynamic entrepreneurs – the majority of tea producers are male and older, whilst youth tend to prefer to look for work in the informal sector in a local city. In Rwanda policy also works against tea, where certain regions are exclusively assigned to tea growing, and so there is less ability for diverse portfolios or rich inter-cropping approaches for smallholders.

Market information and the bigger picture

In recent years there has been a growth in discussion of ‘pro-poor’ value chains, of poor farmer becoming involved in more commercially-orientated agriculture. Across the board, NGOs, donors and commercial firms have subscribed to this perspective and I think that market information systems is one element in this new paradigm in agriculture. Bringing development through profit, new clever finance, insurance, ICTs, market information and prices. However, pro-poor value chain approaches are often narrowly focussed on the immediate economics and neglect the structural (politics, colonial histories, land ownership), social (diversity of livelihoods, risk and gender) and complexities of production.

Market information does have a place though. From our work in tea we see a number of ways that implementers and developers of market information systems might improve activity. As I hope this outline shows, the value of qualitative research is invaluable to designers. My recommendation would be that all market system designers should spend time seeking to understand the supply chains, the relationships and small holder goals before starting to develop any system. How does price break down in the supply chain? Where might price (or other) be useful and when might it not? In hand with this, our own evidence suggests that more integrated approaches are important for success – in terms information, such as price, farmer information (pests, fertiliser, skills), contacts, market intelligence, and in integrating the diverse communication ecologies of farmers.

There is also value is designers thinking of information not only as a top-down exercise. In the tea sector, we saw sporadic online sharing between co-ops relating to tea management and production (horizontal rather than top-down information flows). Indeed, intermediaries such as cooperative were a key node in these information flows. Thus market information systems which consider bottom up information flows and intermediary players more overtly would be useful in improving the ability for market information systems to have impact.

Agricultural Product Seller, rural Uganda

Posted on September 23, 2014 by Jenna Burrell

In the absence of agricultural extension officers (paid by the government to disseminate information and expertise on farming), many farmers rely on the local seller of agricultural inputs for tips and advice on handling crop diseases and pests and dealing with other farming problems. Many new mobile phone apps propose to deliver agricultural extension services via SMS or, in a few cases, through interactive voice response (IVR). An unanswered question is whether farmers are willing or able to pay ‘purely’ for information provided through these services. The agricultural product seller makes his money not directly from his good advice, but from the farming inputs he sells. His good advice may, however, draw farmers to his shop and motivate them to buy the products he sells.

Read the full profile here.

The Myth of Market Price Information: A Working Paper

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Jenna Burrell

Our first comparative case bringing together findings from fieldwork (by Jenna Burrell and Elisa Oreglia) among rural farmers in Hebei and Shandong provinces in China and fishermen and fish traders at Lake Victoria and Lake Kyoga in Uganda. The working paper is titled “The Myth of Market Price Information: Mobile Phones and Epistemology in ICTD.”

A brief summary of the paper is below:

The notion that farmers use mobile phones to acquire market price information has become a kind of shorthand for the potential of this technology to empower rural, low-income populations in the Global South. We argue that the envisioned consequences of ‘market price information’ to market efficiency with benefits at all income levels is a kind of myth. This myth frequently promulgated by mass media outlets such as the Economist, is also the subject of serious discussion among scholars. The idea has become a kind of boundary object recast within the epistemic cultures of economics, computer science, policy work, and development expertise. We draw from our ethnographic work (among rural agriculturalists in China and Uganda) to offer four alternatives to this myth.

We propose the following four assertions countering this myth, that:

(1) information on prices is not necessarily scarce
(2) market prices are often irrelevant or subordinate to other factors in trade related decision-making
(3) improvements in market efficiency realized by the mobile phone may not stem from the better circulation of market prices
(4) obtaining market prices is often not the most valued application of the mobile phone in trade

For further details please download the paper.

Microinsurance and the Mobile Phone

Posted on February 3, 2013 by

This post continues the conversation that was started here: Vulnerability, Markets, and Insurance in Ghana.

paper currency is vulnerable to being destroyed by fire, rats, water, wind, etc.

paper currency is vulnerable to being destroyed by fire, rats, water, wind, etc.

There is a particular event that occurred during my fieldwork in Uganda that is a reminder of how lower-income populations may be prone to natural as well as cultivated risks. We met a second-hand apparel trader who had been collecting her life-earnings in a small, black handbag at home. Since the distance to the nearest bank was almost 50 miles, a trip that would cost her both time and money, she decided to keep her money close at hand, in her own home. Unfortunately, rats got to her savings before she could, shredding almost a $150 in savings to tiny, unintelligible scraps. The bank was unable to ascertain exactly how much money she had in the first place, and therefore, could only return a smaller amount to her. At the time, we believed that access to formal savings facilities would prevent such incidents in the future, however there is some consideration that must be given to microinsurance options as well.

Poorer households may be particularly vulnerable to risk given their limited resources to moderate the adverse consequences, thereby aggravating their conditions of poverty. Development scholars and practitioners alike recognize the need to disburse microinsurance options in order to combat the persistence of poverty. But many challenges abound, not the least of which is the lack of suitable microinsurance products and services for lower income populations. Microinsurance providers struggle with the high transaction costs, limited information, and imperfect enforcement mechanisms. As is prevalent in financial inclusion ventures everywhere, eventually state-subsidized microinsurance services will remain to insure low-income individuals and households, and even then at a loss.

Of course, lower-income individuals and families may not always be willing to part with their limited resources at hand towards a payout that may or may not happen, especially in an environment that is often saturated with microcredit options that provide instant cash. One way that microinsurance companies have been overcoming this hurdle is by selling microinsurance products as an add-on to services that are in extensive use already. Selecting well-regarded institutions that can be co-branded with these microinsurance products is another way to build trust amongst new customers, as well as to ensure that recurring small payments protect lower income populations against risks without actually selling these products exclusively. One of the utilities that microinsurance products are being bundled with is the mobile phone service.

The mobile infrastructure, and mobile phones specifically, may be leveraged in various ways to deliver and support microinsurance options. A recent report by the GSM Association provides an exhaustive breakdown of how the mobile infrastructure can achieve this (Tellez, 2012). While the technology platform can be used to enroll new customers and submit electronic claims, the voice and SMS channels can be used for advertising the product, handling customer feedback, as well as distributing financial literacy information. The agent network becomes indispensable for handling any service points that require manual managing in the delivery of the microinsurance service, and also to cash-in/cash-out any premium payments and/or eventual settlements that may be made in mobile money. The report also indicates that the insurers may use the data on airtime and mobile money for modeling risk and pricing policies.

Microinsurance, in general, has been slow on the uptake with economists pointing to information asymmetries as a huge challenge. More practical challenges also include the lack of reliable data that impede the calculations of premium payments, the capacity to service small transactions, and the need for reinsuring (Morduch, 2006). Mobile microinsurance has seen even more limited implementations with very few live examples. Even then, most of these microinsurance products seek to insure against basic life and accident risks. For instance, MTN Ghana, in collaboration with Hollard Insurance, MicroEnsure, and MFS Africa, launched a life insurance product, mi-Life, in 2011 which is available on the USSD channel. mi-Life insures the MTN mobile money subscriber and next of kin. Premium payments are deducted from the subscriber’s mobile money wallet on a monthly basis, and the SMS notifications serve as receipts. Tigo Ghana also offers a life insurance product in partnership with Vanguard Life, Bima, and MicroEnsure called the Tigo Family Care Insurance. Tigo Family Care Insurance is a loyalty-based microinsurance product, unlike mi-Life that offers insurance through explicit premium payouts. The more a Tigo customer spends in a given month, the higher is his or her insurance cover that can go up to $550. Customers are informed of their current level of insurance coverage on a monthly basis. Easypaisa Pakistan’s Khushal, a mobile savings product that offers embedded life and accidental death insurance facility, is another example of a loyalty-based microinsurance service. An insured user’s coverage varies according to his or her average mobile account balance. The benefits go up to $10,000 for average account balances of $250 and above.

The only example of a mobile microisnurance service that goes beyond life and accidental death policies seems to be Kilimo Salama (“safe farming” in Swahili) that protects farmers in Kenya against the vagaries of the weather. Kilimo Salama is a partnership between UAP Insurance, Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, and Safaricom. Designated, independent rural retailers manually collect farmers’ premiums and transfer the accumulated amount to the insurance company via M-Pesa. However, the monitoring of rainfall (or the lack thereof) is done through automated weather stations. Payments are disbursed directly to farmers via M-Pesa if the monitoring data indicates an immediate payout, thereby eliminating the need for a formal “claims” process.

References:

  • Tellez, C. (2012). “Emerging Practices in Mobile Microinsurance”. In: Mobile Money for the Unbanked, GSM Association. Available at: http://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/MMU_m-insurance-Paper_Interactive-Final.pdf 
  • Morduch, J. (2006). “Micro-insurance: the next revolution? What have we learned about poverty?” In: Banerjee, A., Benabou, R., Mookherjee, D., (Eds.), Understanding Poverty. Oxford University Press, New York.

USAID Webinar: Mobile Market Information Systems

Posted on October 18, 2012 by Elisa Oreglia

Mobile market information systems for farmers: demand- or offer-driven?

Market information systems (MIS) have become a very hot topic in development circles, with a wealth of private and public initiatives to bring market prices to farmers in developing regions via mobile phones. I am very intrigued and very curious about them, partly because in my fieldwork with smallhold farmers in rural China I have never encountered anyone using MIS, nor I have really seen a reason for anyone to use them, since prices are widely known, and markets are (or aren’t) accessible for reasons that go well beyond prices. China might be an unusual case, because of its recent history and because of the government’s heavy involvement in agriculture, but still, I did wonder how such systems would be deployed in other countries, what needs they fulfilled, and how they were taken up by farmers.

So it was with great interest that I recently attended (at 6am!) a webinar organized by GSMA – Mobile for Development  (GSMA is the global association of mobile phones operators) titled “Mobile Market Information Systems for Farmers: Requirements for Success.” It was a very useful introduction to the state of MIS in a number of African countries, and, as all good presentations, it raised more questions than it answered. The slides used for the webinar are posted on the GSMA website, but here are some of the highlights from my notes.

What exactly are MIS? John Zoltner, director of the Information Technology Applications department at the non-profit organization fhi360, defines them as tools to “increase market transparency to increase revenue for smallholder farmers, lower transaction costs for traders, lower cost of goods for consumers.” The added bonus, especially in countries without efficient data gathering processes, is that it “allows governments to track trends in availability of food commodities to create policies or react to shortages.” (see Zoltner’s slides). Transparency of markets was a common theme, explicitly or implicitly, in all the presentations: the starting point of all these projects is that smallhold farmers often do not have access to information that could help them decide what to grow, where to sell, and whether the price they are getting for their crop is fair or not.

And who wouldn’t want more transparent markets? In many countries, agriculture is still the most important economic sector, and any improvement in this field results in improvements in the quality of life of many people. Early efforts to improve agricultural markets through technology were based on radio, faxes, and email. Current MIS are based on a mix of web platforms and mobile phones, which can provide more timely and sophisticated data and analysis, as well as personalized information. Pilot deployments of MIS are taking places in several countries. For example, Robert Turner from ACDI/VOCA Malawi presented the case study of Esoko Malawi, a private-public partnership started in 2011 with USAid funding. ACDI purchased the Esoko web SMS platform, which provides both the technology and the methodology to run a MIS. ACDI/VOCA targeted smallholders, and selected 13 markets that are important production areas in Malawi. By the end of 2011, about 4,000 farmers were receiving prices of staple crops (ground nuts, maize, beans, important because the project focused primarily on food security). The mechanics of how Esoko works are very interesting: ACDI/VOCA started by gathering information about local units of measure used at each market, the converted them to prices per kilogram. Enumerators collect prices from multiple vendors (at least five in each market) and then use the most quoted price as the price of reference to upload to a web platform via mobile phone. After the prices are uploaded, an administrator looks at them to check for outliers or anything that looks unusual. If everything seems in order, the screen is approved and prices are sent out to subscribers; if there are questions, enumerators are contacted, and if their answers don’t clarify the situation, there are key informants who can double check what is going on in each market.

Assessing the impact of MIS is not easy. Turner recognized that the commercial value of the information they were gathering through Esoko was not clear, and that it was hard to predict whether such systems would be sustainable. Given the cost of running MIS (which vary considerably depending on the type of information, languages used, etc; we heard figures from US $30,000 to 70,000, although it was not clear whether these were running costs, set-up costs, or how they were divided between technology and administration costs, etc), they would have to reach an enormous number of subscribers, each paying very small amounts, to make the service viable. Andrew Kizito, a professor at Makerere University in Uganda, discussed the impact of MIS in Mozambique, pointing out that there are several factors that influence whether people receive market information and how actionable such information is: owning a radio or having a cell phone network in the village are clearly necessary ‘infrastructural’ steps to receiving prices, and having access to roads with public transport is necessary to make such information actionable. He found that receiving market information prices had a positive impact on market participation and on the prices farmers got at the market, but his recommendations focused on targeting farmers associations, NGOs, and government officers (all ‘middlemen’) as clients for MIS, rather than individual farmers. Shaun Ferris of Catholic Relief Services talked about the requisites needed for a successful MIS: it has to be valued by the targeted audience, needs to be well promoted so people understand it and know how to get value from it, can easily scale, and provides a multi-channel approach that is easily up-gradable.

Two points that were raised over and over were that marketing of MIS is not only about letting users know about them, but also educating them on how to get value from the information they receive; and that MIS should be part of a bundle of services, that might include weather information, market intelligence, agricultural advice, etc.

And here is my main question about MIS: prices are relatively easy to gather and to process with existing interfaces. Other information, such as localized weather forecast, or brokerage services, are much more complicated to set up if there isn’t already some kind of infrastructure in place. And yet, what if this is the information that farmers really need, rather than prices? What if in the bundle of services, prices are in fact the least important one? In China, farmers know about prices. What they pay for is a daily SMS with localized weather forecast, which is something that they can act upon immediately. So far, MIS seem very much offer-driven, rather than demand-driven. The presenters didn’t mention farmers’ needs, or even farmers’ lives and practices in a contextualized way. Do traders provide farmers with credit, for example, like fish traders in Uganda? What kind of regulations or state interventions exist in the various countries, that influence farmers, fishermen, traders behaviors? In China, the government sets minimum procurement prices for certain crops. These prices are widely known (through tv, radio, newspapers, word-of-mouth, agricultural extension workers, traders, markets, and – last and least, for farmers anyway – websites), and many farmers prefer to grow crops with a lower but safe income that is guaranteed by the state to those that could give them potentially higher, but certainly riskier, returns. At the end of his presentation on Malawi, Turner mentioned that the government sets prices for certain crops in part to protect from exploitation farmers who wouldn’t know what is a fair price for their crop. He went on to suggest that it might be cheaper for the government to support MIS so that farmers are aware of the going prices, rather than setting prices centrally. But doesn’t this mean that the government switches its indirect support from farmers to Esoko, enumerators, NGOs and all the ‘middlemen’ involved in creating and supporting MIS?

Farmers might end up with more knowledge and information about prices and crops, but also with the added burden of increased risk. Is this the goal? It might be – maybe in a context of ‘modernizing’ agriculture, of supporting economies of scale and collaboration among farmers, and of decreasing the total number of smallholders. But how are risks and benefits redistributed when MIS take the place of existing practices – or do we even know enough about existing practices to invest heavily on MIS rather than, for example, on supporting agricultural extension workers? Maybe the next mAgri webinar will answer some of these questions…

 

The Farmer, Rural Shandong Province, China

Posted on September 4, 2012 by Luisa Beck

A profile of a farmer whose main concern isn’t increasing profits, but being able to reliably predict his income. Read more…

The Intimacy of Farming in West Africa

Posted on August 6, 2012 by Jenna Burrell

The film “For the Best and for the Onion!” (2008) by Nigérien documentary fillmmaker Sani Elhadj Magori was screened last week at Stanford University as part of the summer film festival on “Feast to Famine: Global Politics of Food and Water” organized (in part) by the Center for African Studies.

Market prices, and their uncertainty and fluctuation, are a central element of the plot. Market price is a matter on which consequential outcomes hinge. Yaro, the main character, is adversarial with everyone, his wife, his farm laborers, the middleman who comes to buy his onions, a man embattled and under stress. A wedding and the happiness of a young couple hang in the balance. The future bride Salamatou and her fiance are having a less expensive “Abidjan wedding.” They will migrate to the city and thus will not need furniture as is continually noted throughout the film. Yaro reminds himself of this and yet the possibility of financing such an event is a source of pressure and anxiety. The young couple has already had to wait through one season as the onion crop failed. A relative of the groom goes to Salamatou’s family, speaking with her mother, and pleads for the process to be sped up, concerned with the social appearance and dignity of all involved.

Market prices and timing: Yaro consults periodically with a middleman. In the first scene where he appears, the middleman offers a price 18,000 and advises him to take it. The price was 20,000 before, he comments, and even higher, but has gone down a bit. Yaro betting on a better price and bigger profits later on decides to wait. The middleman advises against it, better to sell now in case the prices go down. He tells Yaro he will return the next day, to give Yaro a chance to think it over, but Yaro is resolute in his decision…he will not sell, not yet.

On the farm, a farmer sings energetically to his onions while pulling water from a well, sending it down irrigation canals to feed the onions. “You onion, wife of all men” he sings. As in Gracia Clark’s book on market women in Ghana, Onions Are My Husband, the onion is an intimate of the farmer, to be protected (as a wife) or to be well-treated so that it will provide (as a husband).

Market prices fall. Next the price is 13,000. Yaro is disturbed. He waits. The prices decline further, they are now 11,000 <the audience at the screening gasps>. At that price finally, and with resignation, he sells. The broader context of domestic and global economy is no more than a fuzzy backdrop to the intimate and immediate exchanges. The middleman reminds him that he urged him to sell when the price was 18,000. Another advisor blames the area farmers for being impatient, for emulating neighbors, for lacking responsibility. But what may happen to the price is a mystery and the farmer is at its mercy.

The story has a happy ending. We see Salamatou and her new husband boarding a bus. The wedding has finally taken place (despite the poor price for the onions) and they are headed to Abidjan. We do not know what compromises were made, corners cut, or loans borrowed. The young couple leaves farming life behind for better prospects in the city.

  • Recent Posts

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    • What do RCTs of Market Information Systems actually evaluate?
    • The ‘Myth of Market Price Information’ at the CRS ICT4D conference
    • Chris Foster on ‘Thinking about market information systems’ in Rwanda’s tea sector
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