Abstract

Substantial interest is focused on using video to disseminate agricultural information to rural farmers in the developing world. This paper explores the effectiveness of using this approach to improve rural farmers’ device literacy—that is, their ability to use mobile phones for purposes other than making and receiving voice calls. Findings from our pilot evaluation, conducted with women farmers in rural western Kenya, suggest that videos combined with facilitators can be useful for improving women’s confidence in sending text messages, using ‘m-agriculture’ applications, unsubscribing from services that deduct their mobile phone airtime, and, in general, increasing their awareness of the mobile Internet and its related services (i.e., Facebook and Google). More significantly, our findings also reveal underexplored issues that hinder women’s mobile phone use: in particular, their concerns about losing money to Safaricom (Kenya’s dominant mobile network provider), and the challenges that result from a wide variety of mobile phone screen interfaces. These findings encourage ICTD researchers and practitioners to pay greater attention to corporate power structures affecting mobile phone use, to recognize that rural farmers’ information needs encompass more than just agricultural material, and to raise questions about scalability of instructional video.