Insights into Smallholder Farmers' Willingness to Use Mobile Technology in Sierra Leone

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The West African Rice Company Group (WARC) has been working on a smartphone application that will help its farmers increase the productivity of their plots, augment the desirability of their crops (and thus their market value), and, ideally, help them escape the poverty trap. Smallholder farmers in Sierra Leone, however, have extremely limited access to technology. Therefore, through interviews, we tested how willing they were to use and how easily they grasped information provided through a technology-based platform. The results of this survey allowed us to develop a testing methodology and provide WARC with a series of recommendations on how best to push the project forward.