Hi I'm Isaac; that's me on the left in the Esoko orange. The really great thing about being part of Esoko’s Monitoring and Evaluation team is that I get to go to the field and interact with farmers. I feel this is unique about Esoko, because we don’t just sell services to customers but also regularly follow up to access the impact of those services. One recent trip was the post-training monitoring in the Market Oriented Agricultural Program (MOAP) in the central region of Ghana. In this program, Esoko is collaborating with the German International Development Cooperation (GIZ) to provide 200 farmers, mostly in the citrus and pineapple value chains, access to Esoko price information on their mobiles. Our visit was to measure the level of knowledge retention by farmers as well as the level of impact of Esoko market information on farmers businesses. Two things were clear: 
1) Bringing farmers onto the Esoko service is not simple to achieve. That does not mean it's impossible, but we are realizing and learning all the time. Are training of trainers really successful (how much knowledge is really transferred)? How much prior mobile usage is necessary for farmers before using Esoko? How much training is necessary on not just how to access the market prices and understand them, but also to know how to act on that information? Do we have prices from the right markets? There is so much to learn and improve on to get this right, and we have to continue asking questions, being curious, and evolving as we go.
2) Though we face challenges and should continue to learn how to do better, we are actually beginning to see impacts. This trip revealed that knowledge in using SMS functions (sending and reading) had improved, and that Esoko helped to improve their agricultural businesses through enhancing negotiating power. Stories were recorded from farmers who, as a result of Esoko service, increased their sales revenue between 40–100%. One story was from Mustapha Korantsir (left), a pineapple farmer who was offered 25p (.16 cents) for each of his 2000 pineapples, but based on the price information on his phone saying that pineapples were selling for an average of 1.20 GHC (80 cents), he negotiated with the traders and got a price of 40 p (.27 cents). That's an increase of 60%. And as a result of these successes, the majority of the farmers interviewed affirmed their willingness to pay and continue with the service after the current GIZ intervention.So our work in trying to reach smallholder farmers is far from over and far from easy, but we are inspired and excited by the possibilities. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.
Isaac Boateng, March 2011
