Agricultural Marketing Transformation Through Crowdsourcing System for Product Price Analysis

Abstract

Market information availability is a basic requirement for countries’ economic growth. Market information can be from different sources and need to be addressed to different stakeholders across a different locality. It needed to be made available for public access too. The content will also be updated throughout time. More than 80% of the Ethiopian population life is based on agriculture. The reality is there is no agricultural information system and platform deployed in the country except the (ECX) dashboard, deployed in local markets. Actually, the information infrastructure, such as the Internet, is rarely available. The only way the larger public can get access to the agricultural information is only through call and SMS service. So, in the mobile crowdsourcing system for an agricultural market information system, anyone in the system can access summarized and updated information. The aim of the proposed system is processing and providing aggregated and updated agricultural market price information to stakeholders from crowd data of SMS. The proposed system has five basic components: SMS manager component, information extraction component, data analysis component, crowd management, and request management component. As a means of evaluating the proposed architecture, we have developed a prototype that implements the components of the proposed architecture. It is also tested using sample SMSs. Evaluation result showed that the proposed architecture can provide a mobile-based crowdsourcing system for agro-market information for low-end mobile phone users with price aggregation performance of 80%.