Rwandan farmers with no access to computer and internet services are set to benefit from the new e-market phone device to be launched in March 2008.

The e-market service, anticipated to help farmers countrywide know market prices of their products, was disclosed on Thursday by a senior Rwanda Information Technology Authority (RITA) official.

Wilson Muyenzi, the Project Coordinator of e-Government at RITA made the disclosure during a global video dialogue on Mobile Government at the World Bank office in Kigali.

He said: "With the mobile-based application, farmers can use SMS and tap into a database from the Ministry of Agriculture and be able to get the prices of different commodities in different markets.

"Right now… what happens after the harvest is that farmers guess how much they should sell the prices at because they have no way of knowing what the prices are in the market that same day.”

Ibrahim Kushchu, the Director of Mobile Government Consortium International, told the conference about a similar system that has worked well for farmers in Brazil.

"These farmers receive daily e-mails which give them the prices of the produce they’re selling so they can compete better,” said Kushchu.

Efforts to take advantage of mobile application use are also catching up in India where public-private sector partnership has created 100,000 network access points in an effort to make services more available.

Muyenzi said he hopes to work on creating Indian-style public-private partnerships, and expects MTN to cooperate with the government in this.

MTN Rwanda CEO Themba Khumalo said a representative was not present because the company was not invited to participate.

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