Software Apps for African Farmers Win Prizes

The competition Apps4Africa: Climate Challenge focused on software applications, known as apps, many of which feed information to mobile phones to support development, in this case, for natural resource management. "The regional competition encourages participants to address local climate change challenges through the development of web-based and mobile applications in the East African region," according to this SciDev.Net article.

Winners of the competition include: Grainy Bunch, Mkulima Calculator, and Agro Universe.

Grainy Bunch is a national supply chain management system that monitors the purchase, storage, distribution, and consumption of grain across Tanzania.

Mkulima Calculator from Kenya is an application designed to help farmers know when to plant crops and how to select suitable crops for a particular location using climate and weather data.

Agro Universe, a mobile and web-based application from Uganda, allows farmers with agriculture products or livestock to alert the app’s community so that they can buy and sell goods from each other. The aim of Agro Universe is to create a regional marketplace in which product demand can be located outside the user's immediate area.

These apps are locally developed for local markets. As stated here, "[t]his is creating an ecosystem. This would be significant for Africa, as it creates jobs and local content, which allows them to represent themselves online." The designers include young people who are looking in the direction of creating service provision apps where governments cannot provide services.

The contest was supported by the United States Department of State.