I am an accountancy third year student in Buea University and grew from a subsistence agricultural home. My ambition has always been to improve my parents/community standards of living by improving on their agricultural practices/services. While researching on the best methods/ways I discovered that ICT and mobile phones particularly are the best knowledge/instruments to improve agricultural development.

So this project concentrates on ICT as the fastest/best means of enhancing sustainable agricultural development amongst farmers in our community with emphasising on the necessity of having cell phones and email addresses/going to the internet. So it’s educating/training farmers on computer literacy/internet and importance of ICT. It also uses information from ICT/equipments to produce, advertise and market their products.

Its goals are to introduce the use of ICT amongst farmers in and around our community/villages for information collection/dissemination to promote production/marketing so as to foster sustainable development.

This project was introduced in 12/03/2006; so far it’s yielding wonderful results as many farmers and youths (have cell phones with 08 association’s phone booths). They easily obtain their goods/services and sell their produce, at their door steps with simple SMS to producers, customers or consumers.

It has reduced transportation costs; perish ability, accidents, theft and frustration amongst our farmers, as SMS sometimes are free without any charges.

Our use of the radio/local cable TV network to advertise our produce is also very innovative.

We were finalists in the just ended Stockholm Challenge competition (17th – 22nd /05/2008) with this project and were supposed to attend the conference/workshop, but the Swedish embassy refused us travelling visas Reference; Ulla Skiden email; ulla.skiden@stockholmchallenge.se

Using ICT for agricultural development is not only lucrative for agricultural farmers, but educative to them, their children, wives and youths, since its mostly their children/youths who check their email addresses/receive their phone calls/messages, the youths are gradually understanding the usefulness of the internet.

So their social status is gradually improving, as they surf the internet to collect useful agricultural information, so to they stumble on other important documents and educational opportunities, it’s common to hear them saying I shall acquire my diploma or certificate in the internet.

Many of the youths now have email addresses and belong to international networks like National Youths for African Development, Global Youth Network, African Youths Development Cycle etc.

Finally we all know/accept that we are in the computer age and ICT has come to stay and has brought globalization, so our youths acquiring ICT knowledge and belonging to internet networks shall contribute/acquire knowledge on global social issues.

My participation in GK3 conference is a testimony of youth empowerment.

Its successes now guarantees its future survival, for we all know the influence of the internet and cell phones in fostering sustainable development and since we are in the computer age, no modern development or sustainable activity can succeed without computer/internet and ICT knowledge.

Our concept of stressing the importance of cell phones as the best/fastest ICT equipment for development, was justified by the international Economist Magazine of match 10th 2005 edition concerning socio-economic development that; “-----the debate over the digital divide is founded on a myth that plugging poor countries into the internet will help them to become rich rapidly-----even if it were possible to wave a magic wand and course a computer to appear on every house hold on earth, it would not achieve very much: a computer is not useful if you have no food or electricity and cannot read--------Plenty of evidence suggest that the mobile phone is the technology with the greatest impact on development”.

From the Project officer and President of Practical Association who organized a seminar, informing us about this competition that he got it from Suria Lyoids who too was connected but by Congolop.