Zambia plays a huge role in Africa’s future food production, with over 1.6 million smallholder farmers active in agriculture with abundant land and resources. However, failure to access information and the market has been one of the major challenges that most Zambian small-scale farmers have been facing. This prohibits them from actualising profit from their produce.

But the story has begun to change with the coming of a different organisation which is bridging the information gap through ICT (Information Communication and Technology). Over time, there have been many systems with the recent one being the award-winning Lima Links, a platform built to bring live markets to the smallholder farmers on their farms, accessible on any basic phone.

Most rural farmers do not have Android smartphones and are geographically dispersed over wide areas with poor physical infrastructure, limiting their ability to gain access to market information. This makes it difficult for them to access market and agricultural information as many of the agriculture technology services built in Zambia are Android applications. The Android application, which targets higher level role players in the value chain, such as lead farmers or cooperative leaders, disadvantages the rural, financially constrained farmers, hence the launch of Lima Links.

Lima Links was launched in April 2017, differentiating itself by creating a free service built for the individual farmer on a rural farm. This free Farmer Platform is accessible on any type of phone in Zambia. By dialling and sending a short code, *789#, farmers are connected to view live market prices for common field crops and vegetables such as tomatoes, rape, impwa, onion, okra, and many more. They can also view and access fairly-priced agricultural inputs, such as seeds, fertilisers, chemicals, equipment, and connect directly with input suppliers. Through this Farmer Platform, Lima Links connects farmers directly to the market and helps companies to reach rural farmers who otherwise would have been out of reach.