ICT4D: E-Agriculture Framework in Kenya

Sustainable poverty reduction in developing nations, such as Kenya, is only achievable through economic growth and development strategies where agriculture is considered as a key driver. This is because agriculture contributes to about 45% of the GDP of developing countries, with more than 75% of their population relying on agriculture for employment. It is only important that these countries, focus on how to improve agriculture by making it knowledge intensive as oppose to labour intensive as it is currently. This implies that factors such as policy and legal framework, technology and knowledge management, markets, research among others must be comprehensively explored. In all these, ICT can act as a catalyst to facilitate their incorporation into agriculture. To address this challenge, there is need to integrate information required by the farmers from the diverse sources such as agricultural stakeholders into a single information access point. Such an access point need to be pervasive enough to provide anywhere, anytime and any device information access while meeting the need to avail timely, relevant, accurate and consumable information to farmers.