Some 1.7 million small-scale farmers in Kenya, Nigeria and Pakistan will soon receive personalized agricultural advice through their mobile phones as a means to improve their incomes, food security and resilience to economic shocks caused by COVID-19, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) has revealed, reports NaijaAgroNet.
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The innovative initiative, NaijaAgroNet gathered that one of 11 proposals to receive initial funding under IFAD’s Rural Poor Stimulus Facility (RPSF), comes as a result of a new partnership between IFAD and Precision Agriculture for Development (PAD), a global non-profit organisation co-founded by Nobel Prize winning economist Michael Kremer.
As said by him, using mobile phone technology, farmers will receive low-cost, customized advice to improve on-farm practices, input utilization, pest and disease management, environmental sustainability and access to markets.
IFAD’s RPSF, which was launched recently by IFAD’s UN Goodwill Ambassadors, the actor and humanitarian Idris Elba and the model and activist Sabrina Dhowre Elba, aims to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the livelihoods and food security of rural poor people.
NaijaAgroNet gathered thaT funding for these first 11 initiatives, amounting to US$11.2 million from the RPSF plus $5.2 million in co-financing mainly from governments and implementing partners, will benefit an estimated 6.7 million small-scale farmers in developing countries who are adversely impacted by the economic slowdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
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