Mobile phone proliferation and use among Tanzanian rural smallholder farmers

Mobile communications have significantly eroded fixed line type telephony due to convenience of use as well as value added utilities and features that come along with the mobile phone technology. This study was carried out to establish the extent to which Tanzanian rural smallholder farmers make use of utilities and features on their mobile phones to meet their day to day business needs.

Respondents were 104 MVIWATA leaders and members drawn from Arusha and Kilimanjaro regions. It is found that rural smallholder farmers use their mobile phone devices mostly on social matters and least on business dealings. This is due to lack of adequate relevant business opportunities, absence of basic training or both. These result in limitation of smallholder farming and agribusiness revenue growth potentials through mobile technology promotional avenues including multi-social media. In this regard, institutional efforts and resources should be deployed such that rural farmers gradually change their social and other behavioural activities on mobile
phones to integrate and replace them with value creating business aspects over time.

As for critical challenges facing the rural farmers, a multi-stakeholder approach involving all relevant agricultural value chain actors is required and proposed. In this way, all bottlenecks from rural farming to market and in between will be addressed.

©2017 by Charles L Domician. All rights reserved. Sections of this document can be quoted without explicit permission from source, only that reference to author is requested. Any views expressed in this paper are entirely the author’s, and should in no way be associated to any other institution whatsoever.