FrontlineSMS allows you to text message with large groups of people anywhere there is a mobile signal.

project agro

hi,

As part of my project we want to take rid of the middle men (who gets
100% profit) between the farmer
and the retailer.we can do this by providing the market prices to the
farmers but the problem in this is that
the farmer sends his goods and then only he knows about the prize,that
info is not sufficient for a farmer so
in my project i want to use frontlinesms tool where the farmer and
retailer can have straight contact details,
then have to integrate it with the web to fetch details and send to
the farmer is is possible with flsms ,is this
option thier on flsms.

regards

madan

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by kiwanja on February 18, 2010 at 3:03am

Hi Madan

FrontlineSMS can take an incoming SMS and then pass it on to a web server (or another program running on the computer), which can then look something up or make a calculation, and then send a response back to FrontlineSMS which can then send it the original SMS sender. Check out the "External Commands" section of the "Help" files, "Keywords" section.

Ken

Permalink Reply by madan on July 9, 2010 at 1:38pm

hi kiwi

thanks a lot , i have completed my project and now the process of fine tuning is
going on . it would not be so successful without you guys .thanks a lot.
im sure that this will be helpful to most of the people in india.

regards
madan

Permalink Reply by Peter Burgess on March 17, 2010 at 11:15am

Madan ... you are right that the middlemen may buy at 100 and sell at 200 ... the 100% profit that you talk about, but the middlemen do provide some services that theoretical academic economists tend to forget about and these services do have costs. There is no question that knowledge about prices helps to get people into a better negotiating position ... but the middlemen issue is not going to be resolved just with more knowledge, the producer also needs to have alternative buyers ... in other words many middlemen so that the monopoly control is broken.
Peter Burgess
Community Analytics (CA)

Permalink Reply by nilesh vasekar on April 2, 2010 at 3:41am

sir,
direct communication between farmer and retailer is must.. it may opens new opportunities ..
It will replace poor services of middlemen &it will force middlemen to provide competitive services...
farmers will start some services of middlemen as agri allied activities
..communcication is a key component to solve middlemen

Permalink Reply by Peter Burgess on April 2, 2010 at 9:41am

Dear Nilesh

My position is that good information will help to have an efficient market that works ... and for this the various emerging mobile phone initiatives are very good. I want to avoid the goal of "eliminating the middle man" because the services provided by a good middleman are essential to a smooth running economically efficient society. I would argue that the problem in the middleman space is that there is not enough competition in this area and too much monopoly by middlemen. When there is good information about prices (and supply and demand) and competition among everyone, then there will be better results.

From my perspective, two other things also need to be taken into consideration ... the costs of production, productivity and surplus production on the one side and the demand, affordability and buying power on the other. Everything in the socio-economic eco-system needs to be optimized, not just one thing.

Peter Burgess
Community Analytics (CA)
http://communityanalyticsca.blogspot.com

Permalink Reply by nilesh vasekar on April 3, 2010 at 8:45am

Sir,
thanks for elaborating your ideas which are very true. My comments are based on middlemen and marketing system in India, where middlemen and the whole system is highly incompetent .monopolized one. the technology use is very poor.. hence to expect middlemen improve their services is not worthy..and there are a very few good middlemen.
so to raise a great threat to the present system by alternate one is highly desired.
example-middlemen do not provide warehousing and related credit to farmers.. but one non-banking financial firm promoted warehousing services. ..as a part to provide loan against warehouse receipt.. and it became successful.. so 1 non banking financial company is great threat to middleman in some way... i wish that all of us should share tech knowledge in such a manner that it will be a self help tool for farmers ..

Permalink Reply by madan on July 9, 2010 at 1:41pm

hello sir

you may be correct however what is our main aim is to educate the farmers about the cost
so that they can ask the middlemen .

regards
madan

Permalink Reply by AMWATAH PAUL on September 7, 2010 at 5:27pm

Hello Madan i bet i love your project i happen to come from rural Kenya where farmers are indeed exploited by the unscrupulous middlemen. Madan please i would love to get help from you in helping the farmers. i wonder if your could share the toolkit with me since am not a programmer your assistance will be highly appreciated most by me and the farmers who are going to benefit from the program

Permalink Reply by madan on September 12, 2010 at 4:49am

ya sure mr.paul what type of help you need from me.

regards
madan

Permalink Reply by AMWATAH PAUL on September 13, 2010 at 5:48am

Thanks for the reply. the kind of help i want is, i want to have a system whereby people on the ground can send information on commodity prices via text then that info is stored in a database where farmers can retrieve current info on commodity prices by sending a text request without personally inputting the info to frontline sms. i.e the database is fed with information via text and when a request is made through frontline, it passes the request to the database upon which the requested information is passed on to FLSMS to reply to the sender. right now i can use it to send commodity prices through autoreply feature,but this has to be updated every now and then manually,this is what i want to do away with.i hope you will help thanks in advance.

Permalink Reply by madan on December 1, 2010 at 1:15am

hi paul,

sorry for the late reply i was strucked with my exams and stuffs,ican surely do this for you ,but first you have to create a website with the databases which you want ,create a sample layout of all the pages you want,for what purpose are you goin to work on this project,if its for ngo then ill help you guys,because one of my friend is creating websites for all the ngo's at very low cost or else you create the website and send me the link i can surely connect it with frontline sms.

Permalink Reply by Tambe Harry Agbor on December 19, 2010 at 8:26pm

Hello Madan, I have the same kind of problem that Paul raised. I have an NGO that provides Marketing information for farmers in Cameroon, and I will appreciate help that enables me fully automate and integrate the processes on my website .If this is done, then farmers can simply get the prices for commodities by texting a query for a particular product. I will like that we communicate about this further via email, so that I can send you details of my website so that you help me link it to FLSMS. If you have twitter, you can just open www.twitter.com/tambeharry. Request to follow me and I shall send you my email information. I shall be very grateful to read from you. you can also reply and give me your twitter link so that I send a follow you request.

Thanks in advance.

Tambe harry