Understanding The Purpose and Potential Popularity of Mobile Phone Use in Zambia’s Maize Production

Abstract

There is a growing use of mobile phones in rural areas on account of its relative inexpensiveness and lack of requirement for an urban environment. As a platform for accessing information through text messages and voice calls, farmers are able to collect agricultural information which may lead to higher productivity due to technology spillover. If the use of mobile phones contributes to the improvement of farmers' productivity, their agricultural output level should increase. In this study, we investigate the adoption of mobile phones to obtain agricultural information and its effect on smallholder maize farmers' production using cross-sectional data from Zambia. Understanding such causal effects is indispensable especially against the background of vision 2030. The propensity score matching (PSM) method was adopted to estimate the average treatment effect of treated of mobile phone adoption in agriculture. We found that the use of mobile phones significantly increases farmers' productivity, by about 30%. If farmers start to adopt mobile phones to collect agricultural information, the total maize output would also increase by 30.36%, which would culminate in feeding two more people per household daily for the whole year. Therefore, we cautiously conclude that mobile phone use in agriculture serves the purpose of contributing to the fight against hunger via enhancing maize production and this is driving its popularity among smallholder farmers in rural Zambia.

Towards Cleaner Production: Certified Seed Adoption and Its Effect on Technical Efficiency

“…Farming experience is very crucial for technology adoption because it enables the farmer to adequately filter the authenticity of the available technology [53,54]. However, Mwalupaso et al [55] noted that information access is desirable to facilitate better decisions using up-to-date information. Considering that cooperatives are information machines, they could help to inform farmers if the technology lies within their interest.…”

Towards Auspicious Agricultural Informatization—Implication of Farmers’ Behavioral Intention Apropos of Mobile Phone Use in Agriculture

“…Thus, farmers are able to sell their products more quickly, better and receive higher prices. Also, mobile phones are used to attract new and better knowledge which is a resource for moderately increasing labor and land productivity [19,103]. Lastly, mobile phones do not only enhance farmers' social networks with friends and family but also with different agricultural players.…”

“…In this study, we define information as relevant data that is systematically collected, serving as a resource for the users [12]. Therefore, to improve farm production in general, information access is pivotal [13] as it is the most effective among the critical variables influencing the adoption of useful practices in agriculture [14][15][16][17][18][19]. In fact farm level empirical analysis indicates that mobile phones enable farmers to quickly access information on new markets [5,[20][21][22][23], financial services [24][25][26], agricultural techniques [27][28][29][30], crop prices [16,23,27], advice from experts [29,31] and input sources [32,33].…”

E-commerce Adoption and Technical Efficiency of Wheat Production in China

“…A growing number of recent studies focus on the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in agricultural production and technical efficiency. Overall, the adoption of ICTs (e.g., mobile phones and Internet) is found to be positively correlated with the improvement of technical efficiency [12,31,32].…”