Fellow Presentations: Day 4 (Moulaye Ely Diarra)

Moulaye Ely Diarra is focused on improving the efficiency of the agricultural marketplace in Mali. During a period of a socialist government (1960 - 1980), all commodities were sold to the government at fixed prices. The government would re-distribute them according to the relative needs of the regions in Mali.

Although now in a market economy, the producers (farmers, mostly) are still at a disadvantage, because they lack information. The 67 different market places in the country typically meet on a weekly basis, but there is little aggregated information about the price or demand for quantities.

Moulaye works for the Mali government in a Market Information Systems group, and they have been gathering statistics about price, quantity, stock, completed transactions and market altering conditions since 1989. The data are collected locally, then transmitted as binary files over HF to the central headquarters, where SPSS is used for data cleaning, and reports are run. Unfortunately, it is hard to distribute the information to the producers that could most benefit from it. Few people have cell phones ($200 cost vs. $1/day income) and previous attempts to broadcast via TV failed (contracts with negotiated prices were not respected).

One goal of the project is to create a more distributed system of data publishing and retrieval. Could HTTP run over HF, allowing the serving of dynamic HTML pages of market prices and (appropriately authenticated) submission of new data? Giving this level of information to the public-at-large would reduce the inequity that places the producers at a disadvantage.

A larger goal would be to create a virtual market place, where producers and traders could reach an agreement on the quantity and price of the goods to be delivered, removing the necessity and expense of bringing goods (e.g., a half-ton of wheat or six goats) to the marketplace only to discover that those commodities are not in demand this week.

One of the other fellows mentioned e-chaupal as an electronic market in India, where market prices are set by ITC, a major corporation.