Mobile application technologies in food supply chain
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Date
2016
Authors
Phiri, Ariel Henry
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Zambia
Abstract
The use of ICTs by way of developing mobile applications can go a long way in
improving the small scale farmers and traders’ participation in trade. A mobile
application that can be used by cooperatives to link traders and farmers, can reduce
the need to travel in order to gather the agricultural commodities from rural areas,
which can result in reduced exposure to road traffic accidents, loss of cash, lives and
commodities. On the whole, reducing the cost of doing business and thus making
peasant agriculture profitable. A survey was carried out at Soweto market in Lusaka
and Libuyu market in Livingstone, where small scale traders and farmers were
targeted. Questionnaires were distributed and oral interviews are carried out. It was
found that 35.25% of the total number of respondents obtained their food
commodities from outside their locality. This is one of the reason to establish the
Food Supply Chain. The risks of not establishing a Food Supply Chain were seen
from the results of the survey. These included risks associated with travel, where
30.5% of the respondents lost food commodities, and 91.6% traveled with large sums
of cash. It was also found that 50.4% of the respondents use mobile money facilities
and 75.25% use mobile phones when trading. The data show that the development of
a mobile application was viable and would yield desirable results. A mobile
application, called Smart Trader System was developed using a server which was
connected to a modem. This system interacts with the mobile phone for the traders via
SMS. The system was developed using NetBeans Integrated Development
Environment, MySQL database and java development kit for windows. It has been
implemented and tested. This application will go a long way to reducing the cost of
doing business among the farmers and traders, who may be remotely located.
Description
Master of Engineering in ICT Regulation, Policy and Management
Keywords
Cell phones-Programming , Food industry and trade