Yesterday it emerged at the ICT in Agriculture seminar held in Harare that Mubatsiri Investments, the local licensee of the Esoko Platform, also provides content to the recently launched Ecofarmer product.
The company which has been in business for 18 months provides small holder farmers with sms based market information using the two platforms – Ecofarmer and eSoko. Although not clear at this stage, Mubatsiri apparently partners Ecofarmer in market information dissemination and push bulk sms messaging as the contents provider. Mubatsiri in-turn uses Esoko for pull sms (farmer feedback), bids and offers and scout or polling.
Currently Mubatsiri provides weekly prices of 33 fresh farm produce from 21 markets around Zimbabwe.
Interestingly, Mubatsiri does not transact with the target small holder farmer but instead sells the service to Aid agencies and NGOs who in turn pass it on to the beneficiaries – the small holder farmer. In essence, the paying customer is the NGO and the user of the service is the small holder farmer.
The same approach has been taken with the Ecofarmer and Mubatsiri’s role is to provide Ecofarmer with content that Ecofarmer pushes to subscribers. However, with Ecofarmer, market information is secondary to the primary farming insurance service offered by Econet.
Mubatsiri also offers farmer profiling to enable targeted information dissemination. Farmers can also receive bids and offers directly on the SMS platform (Esoko).
Esoko publicly courted Zimbabwean partners back in 2012 and it seems Mubatsiri Investments beat others to it and is already gaining some considering success. However, the Mubatsiri website neither lists Ecofarmer or Esoko as partners. Maybe it’s time for a web update Mubatsiri.
