New Voicebook innovation exposes Kisarawe farmers to better business opportunities

By Anthony Tambwe in Kisarawe

Hadija Abdallah used to walk over 10 km a day to look for market for her cassava.She was selling in retail, and the market that she had to look for were small buyers scattered around Kisarawe.Even as she went this kind of distance daily, the market was uncertain and unreliable.

But one day, she had about a service she could get comfortably on her phone.Better still, what was needed was not a smartphone but an ordinary small mobile phone. That service, she heard, could help her reach more customers , without moving a foot away from her small kiosk.

“I had about about the service from government officials, where I could just dial a number and record a voice message on a platform in which  other residents around my community could call in and either listen in to my business announcement or record their own depending on their interest at the time,”she says.

First forward, she says, her first announcement was about availability of  almost 230kg of cassava.She did not have all the cassava at her kiosk, but this was an estimation based on what was in her cassava shamba.She could not harvest it all at once because there was not a ready market to buy all of it at one go.

But following her announcement on the voicebook platform, potential buyers called her on the number she had left on the announcement.

The buyers now wanted to purchase all the 230kg of cassava at one go.Weeks later, the finances have been helpful for this mother of two.

The service she used is a technology recently developed by a team of innovators and developers from Kertwang, a US based company that does low income service design.

The company helps organizations design, pilot, and scale revenue-positive services that improve outcomes and mitigate the effects of poverty.

The service has been piloted in Bagamoyo district and Kisarawe district in Tanzania in August and September this year.

In Bagamoyo, they tested in the villages of Zinga, Makurunge,Fukayosi,Gezaulole,Kiwangwa,Kaole and Kiharaka.In Kisarawe, they tested in the more urban Kisarawe town, in Masaki village and Pugu villages.

The locals have christened the service ‘Tulonge Pamoja’,a Swahili creation, meaning, ‘lets talk together,  given that it’s a platform for communication between the user, the service and the community around the user.

Tit bits of how it works

The service platform opens by making the user imagine if they could listen to announcements from his/her  village leaders simply by calling a phone number, and that they could even leave messages of their own for everyone in your community to hear.

It then informs the user from the outset that  its is a free service that lets you do that.

It informs the user that using Voicebook/Tulonge Pamoja , one  can listen to and share messages about topics such as the date of the next community meeting, agricultural news, goods or produce for sale and many additional topics.

It then informs the user that it  is a free service that allows the user to listen to important messages from their village leaders simply by calling a phone number and also allows them  to communicate important messages of their own that they would like everyone in their community to know.

Like other low income agribusiness people in Kisarawe and Bagamoyo, Hadija  vividly remembers  the long distances she used to walk to look for a market for her cassava .Apart from the inconvenience, the market was small and uncertain too.

She says that it has helped her in the sense that as a result, she has  reduced physical movements to places that  are far from her kiosk or shamba.