A Local Perspective: Working an Agricultural Information Service into a Rural Community

Abstract

Accounting for the ways in which ICT initiatives are worked into local communities is part of rendering “the local perspectives” within ICT4D. This paper is part of that. Based on in-depth fieldwork, we investigate the integration of an agricultural information service into a rural community in Bangladesh. We find that it takes work beyond the initial design and cursory introduction of the service to make the service work in a low-income rural community: it takes the strength of the farmers self-help groups to circulate the messages by word-of-mouth, it takes posters placed at key junctions according to a socio-geographic understanding of the village manifest in a map, and it (ideally) involves the support of the elite of the community via the broadcast of messages at places of high symbolic value. It takes all this in addition to a well-made information service delivering relevant and timely messages on for example agricultural matters. Hence, reducing the issue to one of technical delivery mechanism does not tell the full story.