Abstract:
Earlier studies report that agricultural extension service for livestock keepers in Tanzania is not
effectively offered. ‘Ushaurikilimo’ which is a crowdsourcing platform consisting of a Web and
Mobile based agro-advisory system. It is a system which complements the traditional agricultural
extension provided to pastoralists and agro-pastoralists. Mobile crowdsourcing for agricultural
extension service is an emerging approach to address some of the problems experiencing in
traditional agricultural extension service.
This study explored the information seeking pattern of livestock keepers who are using
‘Ushaurikilimo’. In total 1739 questions are in ‘Ushaurikilimo’. Out of 1739 questions and
answers, the study concentrated on 1312 questions since 427 questions related to forestry. Out of
1312 questions submitted to ‘Ushaurikilimo’ via livestock keepers’ mobile phones, 605 (47%)
questions relate to livestock and 53% relate to crops. Most livestock keepers asked questions with
keywords related to chicken, pigs and milk from ‘Ushaurikilimo’ knowledge base. Further data
mining analysis showed that the following keywords are the most queried information by
livestock keepers: poultry management, poultry equipment and accessories, hatching equipment,
feed equipment, feed storage, feed manufacturing machinery, product handling/transport
equipment, quality testing equipment and energy saving equipment, milk processing, housing and
environment, building materials and equipment, feeds and feeding, food preservation, feed
additives and dairy products.
In this study, the pattern of information seeking behavior of livestock keepers matched the pattern
which has been reported earlier by other researchers who explored the information seeking
behavior of livestock keepers who are using other sources of information such as newspapers,
television, radio, farmers’ friends and extension agents. One peculiar result from this study is that
the average response time after the question had been assigned to an expert to answer was 32.49
hours. Thus, the crowdsourcing platform, web and mobile based agro-advisory system proved to
be effective compared to conventional agricultural extension methods. This calls for a need to
scale up ‘Ushaurikilimo’ to complement the traditional agricultural extension service in Tanzania.
