Automation of the grain purchasing Process for Zambia’s food reserve Agency

Abstract

Issues of food security, post-harvest losses, lack of a national farmer database and proper grain inventory system have plagued the Ministry of Agriculture for years. The lack of requisite tools has made the management of the sector a difficult task. This has seen an increase in the number of ghost farmers benefiting from the Farmer Input Support Programme (FISP). The aim of this work is to automate the processes of FRA, FISP and the Cooperatives Society operate, with a specific focus on the farmer registry and the grain marketing process. The objectives are as follows: Map the current business processes of FISP and FRA; Develop a model of objective 1 using cloud and mobile computing technologies; Develop a system prototype that integrates farmers spatial data and mobile computing based on the model in objective 2; and integrate multi-factor authentication into the prototype in objective 3. To meet objective 1, a baseline study was conducted at the FRA depots in Chongwe and Mumbwa. The information gathered from this and from various documents provided informed the development of the model specified in objective 2. Various web technologies such as PHP, Java and PostgreSQL were employed to achieve objective 3. Multi-factor authentication was implemented as an added security feature when interfacing with the mobile application for the final objective.