June 27, 2012
Hosea S. Katende is the Training Coordinator for Grameen Foundation’s Community Knowledge Worker (CKW) initiative. We have included an excerpt of this blog post below followed by a link to the full post on the Applab blog.
A farming household in rural Uganda.
Resources, both human and financial, are being committed to reaching the bottom-of-the-pyramid communities. To contribute to this cause, Grameen Foundation’s AppLab Uganda came up with the Community Knowledge Worker initiative. An information and communications technology-driven model to accelerate knowledge and information uptake by rural farmers as part of its mission to reach out to the poor, especially the poorest, the CKW project builds a network of peer-nominated farmer leaders across Uganda who are trained to use mobile phones to share agricultural information with smallholder farmers living on less than $2 a day. This initiative demonstrates the power of the mobile phone in the agricultural space, leading to such benefits as improvement of food security and incomes for rural population (see Grameen’s model of business in a box).
Funders of initiatives such as the CKW project usually set timelines to see results and impact within three to five years. Though these monitoring and evaluation goals are important, the bigger question is: How long does it take a person at the bottom of the pyramid to adapt to changes, let alone to new technologies?
From my experience working with the CKW project, I have observed that despite the potentially positive impact of any project, rural communities have a lot of social, cultural, political and historical baggage that tends to slow down the pace of adoption. Consequently, visible impact may not be realized in a short time. Community attitude is one of the biggest challenges associated with slow adoption of technologies. A number of people at the bottom of the pyramid feel marginalised and think that there is nothing much that they can do to change their living conditions. On the other hand, such people feel that physical handouts are what will help them, which is not sustainable. As a result, most of these people seem to have settled for their status quo.