Still on the interview with the minister of agriculture.

With an agenda that large, where do you start?
We started the GES – Growth Enhancement Strategy – as a way of ending forty years of corruption in the seed and fertilizer sector. The GES program is run in every single local government across the entire country. Since last year, eight million farmers collected seeds and fertilizers by the GES system, and that has allowed us to improve the food security of 40 million persons within farm households.

Phones for farmers
We reach our farmers directly by mobile phones to give allocations for seed and fertilizer subsidies. Last year [when the distribution of low-cost mobile phones to farmers began], people are asking me a lot of hot questions. “Are mobile phones what farmers need in Nigeria?” They said mobile phones would not do anything.
Well, they were wrong. In the modern age, the most powerful tool in the hand of a farmer is not a tractor – it is the mobile phone, because that phone allows farmers to check market-price information; it allows them to know about weather information; it allows them to get extension service; it allows them to get access to finance; it allows them to get access to micro-insurance; it allows them to get access to their farm inputs, as we have shown by the electronic wallets in Nigeria – an electronic wallet system that delivers vouchers for subsidized inputs to farmers. We know how much they are they getting, how much are they paying and how much our government is paying. With this ICT technology, we have made it into a transparent system. We have empowered farmers. We have cut out the corrupt middlemen from the system.
We have also given dignity back to our farmers. They don’t beg anybody today to get seeds and fertilizers – and they shouldn’t. The mobile phone is everything for the farmers of Nigeria today.
Nigeria is estimated to have 125 million cell phones, reaching 75 percent of the population. But they don’t reach everywhere, do they? And where they don’t reach may be where they’re most needed – by the poorest, most rural farmers.
Despite all the successes we are having with it, one of these infrastructural challenges is the penetration of mobile phones in rural areas. There are a number of our rural areas where you don’t have good mobile phone penetration- but also you don’t even have stability of a connection enough for you to make a transaction. So we started looking for new technologies, trying to innovate – asking how we can get around this problem.
#copied.