Improving Agricultural Market Performance:
Developing Agricultural Market Information Systems
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Figure 11: Notice Board for Grain Price Information at Kibaigwa Market in Tanzania
Source: NRI (2017) “FARMAF Final Narrative Report”, October 2017The information dissemination strategy adopted by ZNFU, which is contributing to the financial
sustainability of the MIS, includes the following:a. Mobile phone-based dissemination of price information entails revenue-sharing with
the service providers.
b. Publication of a monthly journal, which covers analysis of market developments as well
as other important extension information and sector policy advocacy issues, attracts a
wide readership. The farmers’ union also runs a television discussion programme
covering similar topics. That programme has very high audience ratings.
c. It has therefore been possible for the ZNFU to leverage commercial sponsorship from
the two sources, which it uses to also partly cross-subsidise radio broadcasts in rural
communities.
To complement efforts made under FARMAF to improve output market performance, specific
attention was paid to the need to create and maintain an enabling policy and regulatory
environment. This is because of evidence showing that disabling actions by governments can
undermine the development of the market institutions and reduce the utility of MIS (Coulter and
Onumah 2002).