Tanzania’s smallholder farmers struggle to benefit from digital agriculture

Dodoma region, Tanzania – Theresia Abel Nyoka has received messages on her phone about M-Kilimo and e-Kilimo, digital services designed to help farmers, but she has never registered for either.“It is simply because we have not been given education. I do not know their importance or benefits,” she told Al Jazeera by phone from Paranga village in central Tanzania’s Dodoma region.M-Kilimo, a Ministry of Agriculture mobile service, provides market information and farming advice, allows farmers to advertise produce and enables them to ask agricultural extension workers for help. The broader e-Kilimo platform brings government agricultural services together through a website and smartphone app.Nyoka instead relies on a system she understands. She takes her produce to a warehouse operated through her Agricultural Marketing Cooperative Society (AMCOS), where farmers pool crops for sale at organised auctions during the marketing season.Jeremiah Luwe, 49, a maize and pigeon pea farmer from Ngomai village in Kongwa district, has tried using M-Kilimo on his smartphone. But he says responses to questions about markets and agricultural inputs can take up to two weeks.“Sometimes the information a...