How U.S spent Ksh.10M teaching Kenyan farmers how to use Facebook

Bundles charges are pretty much the only cost many of us agree to spend to access Facebook and even that is begrudgingly.

But the United States, spent a lot more than the Ksh.5 many spend on the giant social media platform daily, actually it spent enough money to buy you a whole house and have some change.

According to the 2017 Festivus Waste Report, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) allegedly spent over Ksh.10,264,090.82 teaching Kenyan farmers how to use Facebook and Google.

The report, released by U.S Senator Rand Paul alleges that Kenyan farmers suffer from “device illiteracy,” with many lacking the ability “…to perform the basic handset operations needed to take advantage of these services.”

The report further adds that part of the project package was the production of popular program Shamba Shape Up “where the hosts visit farms across Kenya on the brink of collapse and offer advice on how to save them, or to solve problems that confront them.”

Below is the comprehensive report;

“Farmers in Kenya could harness the power of mobile devices to improve their crops, but they suffer from “device illiteracy,” with many lacking the ability “…to perform the basic handset operations needed to take advantage of these services.”

At least, this was the premise behind the Simu Shape Up: Edutainment to Shape Up Cell Phone use Among African Rural Farmers program, a USAID-funded effort to improve cell phone literacy among rural farmers in Kenya. Using this “edutainment” model, this project developed “educational short programming… to share the benefits of mobile programming for agriculture.”

The project produced segments to air on the Shamba Shape Up television show, a reality format show airing on Citizen TV Kenya. According to a 2013 feature in Modern Farmer, the Shamba Shape Up program is wildly popular across Africa, where the hosts visit farms across Kenya on the brink of collapse and offer advice on how to save them, or to solve problems that confront them — a familiar construct for reality television.

The segments associated with this U.S. taxpayer-assisted project aired as part of episodes on June 19, September 11, and September 18, 2015. Interestingly, the Modern Farmer feature notes that the creators of the Shamba Shape Up program were already using text messages as a tool to interact with farmers — and at least a year before USAID funded a program to improve cell phone literacy among Kenyan farmers.

It turns out that farmers can send a text message to Shamba Shape Up to request a free brochure on any of the topics discussed by the show, with four to six thousand brochures requested each week as of 2013. In other words, farmers were already harnessing text messages and mobile technology to help their farms, with the pace of progress likely only increasing their numbers. American taxpayers, meanwhile, receive little to no benefit from producing television infomercials telling foreign audiences how to Google.”