Using Open Source Framework for Mobile Based Agricultural Data Collection and Reporting system for Ethiopian Rural Areas.

Abstract

Data collection is one of the important components of Agricultural systems. Decision makers, policy makers and service providers need accurate and timely data in order to improve the quality of their services. Current practice of collecting agricultural and rural development related data is through paper based methods where physical forms are filled with data and processing the data collected manually. The transcription of data for analysis is difficult and lead to low quality of data especially when the data volume is large. Furthermore, the supervision of multiple data collections from multiple locations is difficult and may lead to large time lag for data to be available for usage. This study reviewed existing data collection systems and the available open source tools that can be used to improve the data collection and reporting in agricultural information system and further proposed a prototype using open source data collection frameworks to test its feasibility in improving the agricultural data collection in Ethiopian remote rural areas context. The study focused on the statistical agricultural data, which are reported to secondary governmental agricultural office from remote kebeles and farming centers. The proposed prototype offers ways of collecting this data through mobile phones and visualizes the collected data in a web application. Finally, a qualitative study was conducted to assess challenges in remote agricultural data collection and evaluate usability and functionality of the proposed prototype. The evaluation of the prototype using the domain expert shows the promising result that the mobile technologies particularly when it used with open source technologies, can improve the agricultural data collection and reporting systems for the remote rural areas. As a future work, the system needs to be extended by including more stakeholders at this sector. Further, Including crowdsourcing and MGovernment functionality would make the prototype better.