 I'll just give a bit of context. By 2015, there's going to be one billion mobile phones in use in Africa and in a number of these countries where there's still a majority of citizens making their living through agriculture, there's now starting to be a very interesting intersection of how mobile phones can support people in bettering those livelihoods, whether it's through daily market price information, whether reports or other kinds of information or advice hotlines for small scale farmers. There's a number of apps related to this that you'll see throughout the continent. Also, you see in many other areas, some of the earlier ones with proven impact include daily market prices for fishermen in Kerala, India, which actually ended up reducing wasted fish that were never used. It increased farmers, fishermen's profits by 8%, reduced prices by 4% for people purchasing those fish. That's just one very small example. There's, you know, many ways that the advent of, you know, so many people having personal mobile devices can intersect with a lot of the agricultural issues that folks here are talking about. So we thought that it would be best instead of hearing from me to hear from Sue, who is an organic farmer outside of Nairobi. She is also a tech entrepreneur and she won the first round of Apps for Africa with her app called iCOW in 2010 and it has since been growing and having some exciting success. So we thought it would be best to just let you guys speak with her directly. Oh, there's no video. Oh, hi, Sue. Hi, Alana, how are you? I am here. I'm having a great day in Nairobi. There's thunderstorms all over and for some odd reason, connectivity is somehow limited. So I can hear you. Can't see you. Well, now everyone can, to the question we might discuss later about appropriate technology and when to use SMS versus when to use a web that requires a reliable bandwidth. You're seeing it tested here live in action. Well, anyway, so everyone say hi to Sue. Hi. Hi, everybody. And I heard a voice in their high hands. So it would be great if you could just first describe what the iCOW product is to everyone in the room so we can all have a clear picture of it and what in your personal experience inspired you to develop it. OK, I'll start with a description of the application. It basically is a, some farmers describe it as like a mobile midwife. And what iCOW does, it's a feature, a product over mobile phones, it's got seven different features. One of them is a gestation calendar. The other is just access to information. We've got a marketplace as well, iCOW Soco. We've got an alert system where we send out to farmers. And then we also do crowd sourcing from farmers on diseases. What inspired me to develop iCOW, I've been working in the agricultural sector now for the last 14 to 15 years, mainly in the organic sector. And one of the things I've realized is that there is a great dearth and a lack of information for farmers. As I develop my little business, I'm a small scale farmer myself, and as I develop my business, I had to start training farmers with the help actually of Hans there from BioVision. And we did a training program out in just about 130 kilometers out of Nairobi. And it became so evident that there was nothing. Farmers were calling many of our African farmers farmers, but in actual fact, there are people living off the land, trying to echo living off the land without a lot of support. Our extension service doesn't seem to be growing. Our government extension service doesn't seem to be growing at the pace of our population growth, all the farmers needs. So whilst training farmers and helping to develop tools that would educate them, including the organic farmer magazine, which is a magazine that goes out to 20,000 copies of printed a month, and there is a readership of about 200,000 farmers, including the website, again, developed by BioVision, infinite website. I felt like there was a lot of information out there, but the farmers, not enough farmers had access to it. It was a small closed group of organic farmers and it just wasn't widespread enough. And I started thinking about how we could use the mobile phone to disseminate information. It was one day I was lying in bed and I made a phone call to my daughter and she didn't answer. It was probably the best time she didn't answer because I ended up listening to her ringback tone. And I thought, well, why isn't this information, why isn't it useful information? I don't listen to this rap stuff. And then I thought, wow, what if we can actually fill this space with information and farmers can actually call in and use it because I'm not paying for that dead space. So I approached Michael Joseph, who was the CEO then of Safari Common, asked him if I could try doing this and he said, well, it sounds like a good idea. How would you expect to do it? And that started the development of a much bigger voice based system, which I was excited about because I thought I could do it in different languages for farmers that were illiterate and for farmers in different areas in the country. And it brought me into the tech space, which was very new to me and very confusing. And it was actually whilst developing this much bigger platform or trying to that the apps for Africa competition came about. And I was asked by Eric Hersman, who's the founder of the iHub in Nairobi to enter my big product into the competition. I thought I can't do this. It felt like it was a 24 hour petition and the product that I was doing, I was just learning about, you know, what databases and all sorts of things. I thought I can't do this. And I thought, but let me take a small component out of the area of livestock, the cow calendar. And we can probably digitize that in a very short time. And that's literally how iCal came about. The first feature on it was the gestation calendar, which was very useful in terms of what happens. The gestation period of a cow was just like a human nine months, but most farmers will continue feeding their animal without really knowing whether the animal is in fact pregnant. They may continue to milk their animal due to the period where it should be resting because it's due to give birth. So the idea was that the system, farmers would sign themselves onto the system and we would send them information. We wouldn't wait for them to ask. We would actually send them information at pertinent times. From the time they registered the insemination date of the cow, 17 days later, we would send them a message saying, watch the cow during this week. If she goes on heat again, she's not pregnant. She has not conceived. You need to re inseminate her. If we didn't hear from the farmer for three months, another prompt that went out was, do a pregnancy diagnostic test. And on June 3rd, 2011, farmers that started using it, they were just, you know, coming back and saying, you know, I've reached eight months and my cow has not gone on heat again. I wish this product had been there before. So that was the first feature and added to that. We decided to do linkages for the AI and the veterinary service in this country so that farmers could access them very quickly. And it's really simple. We just put the two databases on the platform and farmers send the word AI to our short code. The short code is sitting over the three top mobile networks in the country. They get a response saying, where are you? Where's your location? They send the location. And then they get the telephone numbers of all of the AIs within their immediate vicinity or their vets and in fact, now grown on to other extension offices as well. And so what was your sense prior to AI cow and to other mobile agricultural apps? Where were most of the small scale farmers in Kenya getting their information from? If they were getting that information at all and how reliable was it? The gestation of their cows. There were some cow calendars that would go out with the feed manufacturers as you'd find it in the bag of feed. So it was like a lure to get farmers to buy their feed. Other forms of education were going out across many NGOs working in the area. Radio, most farmers would listen to radio but nothing, an extension services on the ground but nothing really comprehensive with massive outreach. And so now that AI cow has been launched for a while what's the current data you have on usage? Do you have any sense of the sort of impact to date or any impact stories you could share with us briefly? We did a survey over a group of farmers when three months after we launched it in September and we asked them a whole bunch of questions and many of them said they were following the information they were getting. Sorry, one of the features I didn't tell you is a information prompt three times a week. So they get information three times a week and hopefully they'll act on it. It's about feed diseases, vaccinations, et cetera all around the value proposition of the cow, how to produce more feed and how to produce your own feed as well. During that survey, there was not a lot of impact that we could see but farmers were following. They said that they were following the information they were getting. Seven months later in January, we took the same group again and did test and surveyed them again asking them similar questions and a few more. And 42% of them said that they actually had increased incomes largely due to increased production of milk and more sale of milk, which was really great. Other impact that was felt was healthier cows, less calf mortality. Some of the AIs on the ground were saying they were getting more business. Some farmers had actually produced feed before they actually had their animals. They were growing feed and now saying they were starting to get ready to buy a cow. Now they knew what the animal needed. And other farmers were saying they had stored feed. They had stored silage. We did a long series of prompts about silage making and they were storing their feed now, heading for the dry times. That's great. So I wondered, part of the Apps for Africa model as I imagine Lynn discussed is having local technologists, local civil society leaders co-create and co-develop solutions to local challenges, you know, where they can bring their local insights to bear in a way that others might not. So Stu, I'd be curious to hear from you. You know, as someone who brought this kind of local insight to bear in a really innovative way, you know, how can the folks in this room be doing more to help support and scale and find local solutions like the kind of work that you're doing? I think one of the advantages that we had is that we had a lot of subject matter expertise. And I think that there is a lot of focus now on the angle of the technical side of things, the techies being the people. Stu? Yes. Yeah, we can hear you, sorry. Okay, sorry. I'll start again. What I was saying is I think that there is a large gap between the people with subject matter expertise and the developers who can actually develop the software. And I think what tends to happen is that there is a lot of concentration on supporting the technologists as opposed to the people who've got subject matter expertise, but one without the other cannot work. And I think that focus needs to shift towards where that subject matter expertise is. I agree. Sorry, just I wanted to see, since we only have just one or two minutes left with Sue, if anyone in the room had any questions for Sue, I'm happy to repeat them to her through the mic. I don't know if she'll be able to hear. Oh, okay. Anyone have questions? Otherwise, I'm happy to ask more questions of my own. Oh, go ahead. Okay. So, Sue, did you hear that? It was asking that sort of your plans for the app in the future and kind of what you see as being the vision of scaling it up. Without a doubt, being a mobile application, we need to scale it with strategic partnerships in the mobile space, and that's what we're working on at the moment. It's not very easy because they're giants and we're tiny. And in order for us to actually have any leverage, we're talking about having to have the numbers and we're marketing the product into the farmer's space. Today, just this morning, we're actually on one of the top radio stations at Kikuyu. It's a vernacular radio station and farmers are joining the platform quite rapidly. But we find that going into strategic partnerships where you've got what I call pretty valuable IP, it's really tough getting those negotiations right with the giants. And I think that support around those areas for young developers, for older developers as well, is quite necessary. I'd like to tell you something really interesting that happened over the last two days though. And this gives you an insight of how technology is going to change the way we do agriculture in Kenya. I'm a member of a Facebook group. It's called Farming Kenya. There are about 850 young farmers on the platform. And I'm really happy they're young farmers who are energetic, they're tech savvy, they're web savvy, et cetera. One of the threads that came up a few days ago was about the plight of farmers across an entire district, thousands, tens of thousands of farmers in the country where the maize seed has actually failed. Maize seed they've planted has grown to two feet high, knee height, and it's just suddenly got a disease and is dying. Nobody knows why. They're not sure if it was a seed that was affected or whatever. But in terms of food security, it's an absolute disaster. It's got nothing to do with climate change. It's got to do with something that happened with the seed. A couple of days later, there was another thread about somebody who, the Kenya Agricultural Research Institution, and he was saying that there was a fellow there who really helped him. And he was asking if anybody appreciates the people that are working in these research institutions. So I sent a list of all of the seed. Can you still hear me? Yes, you dropped out for 10 seconds, but we can hear you. Sorry. So he sent me a list of all of the seed, and many of the seed were fodder seed for livestock. So I quickly put it onto the iCal platform and broadcast it to 9,000 farmers. And broadcast on the SMS that I sent, there was a telephone number of that research institution and sat back and waited to see what would happen. So this was Facebook working with iCal, sending a message out to the farmers. The farmers then called in the research institution. And some of them called us back and said, you've given us a number that doesn't work. And we started to panic. And when we rang them, it turns out that they were so inundated with calls from farmers across the country that they were giving them two minutes only to speak. But many calls were just dropping because they couldn't deal with the traffic. And then some farmers in Nairobi were saying, how is it that we're going to get the seed? And this is the coolest part about it. The institution now is accepting M-Pesa payments for seed. And then they're dispatching the seed by local transport or G4S. So it's a mixture of mobile money, mobile phone, Facebook, and the regular phone and transport. But farmers are getting the seed now really, really quickly. One of them actually, I put a little video up on the discussion that we had because we called the station and I videoed the conversation. And one of the farmers has written and said, it's really cool. My seed has been dispatched and I've got it. It's coming. It's on its way. So it's amazing how technologies are going to change the way we can react to issues on the ground. Well, Sue, thank you so much. Unfortunately, we're out of time. If people want to learn more, you can Google iCow and learn a whole bunch more and maybe download it onto your own phone if you happen to be in the neighborhood. But thank you so much, Sue. We really appreciate you joining us and I hope the weather clears up. My pleasure. Bye-bye, everybody.