wife-project

Gambia, West Africa-based The Wife Project has launched a new Kickstarter campaign today to create a mobile application and website which is going to help connect female farmers in Gambia connect and sell their produce directly to customers in urban markets. The Wife Project engages 300 rural women farmers in gardening, farming and entrepreneurship to reduce their poverty and helps them create a better life for themselves.

Water and seeds are not just some of the problems that these farmers face, instead lack of markets to sell the produce in is a much more pressing issue. Farmers in rural Gambia have intermediaries as their only market, locally called “bana bana,” to sell their produce to but they capitalize on the poverty and desperate situations of these women to buy their products at very low prices which are then sold for better profit in the urban cities.

The Wife Project aims to develop a mobile application and website that will eliminate the need to deal with intermediaries and connect these farmers directly to customers in urban areas of Gambia, the app and website will be developed with the help of socialcoders.org, which will also provide farmers with access to real-time market price for goods, pest management and disease control guides as well as tutorials for best farming practices.

The internet has proven to be a very valuable tool for farmers particularly in countries where a large number of the population is associated with this trade. The Indian government is working to triple the number of farmers who can access weather and crop forecasting on their mobile phones so that they can better protect their crops, the value of this timely information to the Indian economy is believed to stand at $10 billion.

Farmers in India also have access to services that allow them to operate their irrigation pumps remotely through SMS messaging, this eliminates the need for farmers to walk many miles to pumps, often during night when electricity supply is a bit more reliable. Many of them are also using mobile instant messaging apps and Facebook to improve their access to urban markets which results into more prosperity for them and their families.

The Wife Project aims to raise €10,000 with this Kickstarter campaign, it runs through August 31st, 2015.

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