Project Final Report: Promoting Trade Integration in Regional Legume Markets with Mobile Technology
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EmailFrom the December 2023 Newsletter
This project focused on understanding the linkages among, and participation rates in Nigerian and Nigerien markets. The project's concern was that tools are needed to enhance market integration in the region (and within countries in the region), and the key research question was how the adoption of digital technology affects market participation.
The project team launched the KasuwaGo app in June 2021 to provide actors in the legume value chain a virtual marketplace -- breaking market barriers to information access for anyone with a smartphone. It was established that more that 40% of traders and farmers had smartphones, and this was growing, on course to be a majority in the short-term. The app was co-created with guidance from farmers, buyers, and sellers at all levels in the value chain. Their input into the development process came through face-to-face interviews before the development process started (before the pandemic), as well as by focus groups that reviewed the nearly completed app to give feedback that further improved the app. This provided confidence that the stakeholders would accept the platform, because it was made to their specifications.
The project trained and deployed more than 200 youth to reach out to markets, as technical help agents to support traders and farmers who were interested in the app. The trained youth reached more than 200 markets. This process served to address the cross-cutting theme of youth engagement, as well as the project goal of connecting markets with technology, as it helped push the number of registered users for the e-marketplace up from about 4,000 to above 13,000 users.
In the final technical report, project leadership summarizes the objectives and planned activities, lists outputs and outcomes, and describes the challenges and opportunities that remain for this application.
