Volume 15, Number 2

The Development of Climate Agrometeorological Application for Farmers in Namibia

  Authors

Valerianus Hashiyana, Nalina Suresh and Abel Natangwe Mwedihanga, University of Namibia, Namibia

  Abstract

Climate services involve the timely production, translation, and delivery of useful climate data, information and knowledge for societal decision making. In order to create climate services for farmers that are truly integrated with user-centric design into the development process in an African context, the study has finished an important and crucial step by conducting a literature review and designing a prototype for the application. The goal of this study was to create climate services for farmers in an African context that are genuinely integrated with user-centric design. This led to the co-design and development and integration of a mobile application that provide climate and weather information as well as agricultural information for the main crops such millet, maize and sorghum. The research applied using qualitative research using interview with 3 farmers in the field using random sampling with the approach to inform the study. A survey has been administered to find out how people understand climate services, Agro meteorology and help enhance the mobile application’s user experience. A Results shows that farmers are determined and ready to use and excited with the application. These innovations helped farmers to reduce the cost, increase crop capacity and profit. A hypothesis was set that there is a need for integrating AI into a farmer’s application for making farming process more progressive and efficient farming and the integration of Market Place (MP) for farmer’s application to market and sell their product the integration of notification system that allows farmers to receive real-time data and IOT for real-time data. The data collected and the survey results demonstrated that the research objectives were being met. The study aims to develop the application that would be scalable, durable and fault tolerant for farmers to use the application successfully.

  Keywords

Climate services for farmers, Co-design, Mobile application, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Thing.