Mobile application development framework to support farming as a business via benchmarking: the case of Tanzania

Contributions from various researchers and scholars have made major advances relevant to a wide range of mobile applications at various scales. Although current agricultural and rural development (ARD) systems have features that are needed for farming as a business (FAAB). It is established that all of them have limitations in realising benchmarking as their basic principle. Common limitations across all systems, include 1) scarcity of data for modelling, evaluating, and applying benchmarking and 2) inadequate knowledge systems that effectively communicate benchmarking results to farmers. These two limitations are greater obstacles to developing useful mobile applications than gaps in conceptual theory or available methods for using “Farming as a Business via Benchmarking (FAABB)”. This paper presents reviews of the current state of mobile application development frameworks, focusing on their capabilities and limitations to support FAABB. The paper presents a new framework to support FAABB in the Tanzanian context, which is implemented through a FAABB cyber studio hosted at the Nelson Mandela –African Institution of Science and Technology (NM-AIST) in Tanzania. The framework promises to address not only the knowledge codification problem, but also the need for a cultural change among agricultural researchers to ensure that data for addressing the range of use-cases are available for future mobile application development. The FAABB framework has been tested in the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT) and its initial results provides a useful starting point for developing m-apps for addressing ARD challenges in developing countries.