Improving Agricultural Market Performance:
Developing Agricultural Market Information Systems
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Most of these countries have, therefore, piloted various market-supporting institutions
including different types of WRS and commodity exchanges (Onumah, 2013). The outcome of
the pilots has, however, been variable as progress has been rather slow partly because of
disabling policy actions resulting from government interventions to cushion producers and
consumers against price shocks (Coulter and Onumah 2002; Myers and Jayne, 2012). Food
security objectives are often prioritised relative to the goal of fostering output market
development. However, the case of the MIS in Burkina Faso, which is also linked to the
development of WRS, shows that these objectives do not necessarily have to be mutually
exclusive. That case is reviewed in this section.
4.4.1 BURKINA FASO: LEVERAGING SUB-REGIONAL 2GMIS FOR BENEFIT OF
FARMERS Afrique verte is a sub-regional agricultural MIS which operates in three OIC member countries
in West Africa, namely: Burkina, Mali and Niger. It has been active in Burkina Faso since 1990
and disseminates price and other market information through mobile telephones and its
website. (David-Benz et al., 2012). In addition, it supports policy advocacy by producer
organisations with the aim of improving agricultural marketing systems in the participating
countries. Conféderation Paysanne du Faso (CPF), a national farmers’ organisation is part of the
Afrique Verte network. It was also an implementing partner in the EU-funded Farm Risk
Management (FARMAF) Project which supported actions to improve and scale up the use of MIS
andWRS specifically targeting SHFs. Prior to the launch of FARMAF all theWRS pilots in Burkina
Faso focused mainly on assuring food availability during the “hunger season” (Coulter 2012).
However, under FARMAF a commodity quality assurance system (QAS) was instituted which
allowed farmers to sell to major buyers such as WFP, SONGESS (a government-owned grain
trading company) and a large-scale private grain trader. Depositors were also linked to
microfinance institutions (MFIs) in order to access inventory finance (NRI, 2017).Unlike the strategy adopted by MVIWATA in Tanzania and ZNFU in Zambia, which targeted MIS-
related investments under FARMAF in proprietary systems (see Section 3.5.1 in Chapter 3), CPF
opted to collaborate with Afrique Verte in disseminating information on prices for all major
agricultural commodities. The Afrique Verte also offers the following:
 A platform through which various parties can post requests to buy or sell a range of
products; and
 Information on stocks available for sale, including details of the geographic locations where
they are stored, especially when stored in specified warehouses.
CPF’s participationmade it possible to specifically link certified warehouses engaged in theWRS
pilot to the MIS. It also invested in a switch from the ‘Java application’ used by Afrique Verte,
which was noted to have hampered access by most smallholder farmers because it was not
available on most of the commonly-used mobile phones, to Android mobile telephones. In
addition, CPF organised a series of awareness events to enable farmers “to master the use of the
new application on their mobile phones”.
The results, as reported by NRI (2017), showed that farmers storing grains in the certified
warehouses under usually checked prices disseminated via the phones before making