The ICT and media Innovation Community in Agri-Hub Rwanda is organising a series of events to promote farmer entrepreneurship by facilitating access to information and communication technologies. The first ‘Meet the Market ICT event’ took place on 7 February and attracted more than 50 participants.

Attaining sustainable agricultural development is a worldwide strategic concern. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have a potential to contribute to achieving significant economic, social and environmental benefits. Though the ICT environment in Rwanda has continued to evolve and became one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy, most farmers have no information about its use and how it can contribute to improving their businesses. This limits the take-up and utilisation of these technologies.

Agri-ProFocus Rwanda Agri-Hub and the ICT Chamber of the Private Sector Federation have taken up the challenge and started with organising “meet the market” events to better understand constraints in ICT adoption for agricultural development, feasible options to reduce these constraints and contribute to developing effective policies for improving the use of ICT in promoting farmer entrepreneurship.

In line with the 2013 action plan for the ICT and Media Innovation Community, on February 7th 2013, the 1st “Meet the market event” was held at KLab facilities in Kigali. A total of more than 50 participants attended this event that lasted for 3 hours.

The key outcomes of this first session were:

• The next event will be organised in May in the Southern Province. Farmers will be mobilised to attend in big numbers;
• It was agreed to start running some of the software applications and have them already operational before the bigger event in May;
• The Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources (MINAGRI) agreed to provide its support to software developers;
• Developers agreed to consider the needs of farmers by developing ICT applications that respond to their basic needs. These applications will have to be in Kinyarwanda to facilitate farmers’ interface;
• On the spot, one representative of a farmer organisation started negotiating a deal with a software developer. His rice cooperative needed software to manage the disbursement of inputs to members.
• Moreover, participants engaged in deep discussions on how ICT service providers can effectively address the needs of farmers.

In November 2013, the Technical Centre for Agriculture (CTA) will organise an International Conference on ICT for Agriculture (www.ict4a.org). Negotiations are underway to share success stories from this Innovation Community in the Conference.