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WeFarm is a unique peer-to-peer knowledge sharing platform for smallholder farmers. WeFarm users can ask and answer farming questions and share farming tips, via SMS or online, enabling farmers in rural areas without internet access to share information without having to leave their farm. WeFarm is built around the principle that rural farming communities in developing countries have generations worth of knowledge to share, but lack the tools to do so. It is therefore one of the few SMS and farming informations service based around peer-to-peer, crowdsourcing of knowledge. Users ask a wide range of questions regarding farming techniques and share information around business ideas, or how to improve livelihoods. == History and Pilots == The idea for WeFarm was born in 2010 out of a perceived need for greater access to information for the 500 million smallholder farmers in developing countries. Only approximately 10% of smallholder farmers have any access to the internet but it is thought that around 90% have access to basic mobile ‘feature’ phones.〔(Emerging Nations Embrace Internet, Mobile Technology )〕 Kenny Ewan, CEO of WeFarm, and Claire Rhodes, General Manager of the Cafédirect Producers Foundation (CPF), developed the idea for WeFarm together in 2010 as a project for CPF, a UK-registered charity that works with ~280,000 smallholder tea, coffee and cocoa farmers and their organisations on innovative, community driven projects.〔(Cafédirect Producers Foundation - About Us )〕 They developed WeFarm together as a peer-to-peer knowledge sharing platform, giving smallholder farmers a way to access information from other farmers around the world through basic mobile phones and SMS. WeFarm was piloted, tested and developed over 2011 and 2012 as a CPF project with funding from the Nominet Trust.〔(WeFarm - Supporting smallholders overseas )〕 This initial prototype of the system was tested in partnership with smallholder farming organisations in Peru, Kenya and Tanzania with successful proof of concept achieved - a real-time, multilingual knowledge sharing by farmers in 3 countries with no access to internet.〔(A Nominet Trust Case Study - WeFarm )〕 In 2012 WeFarm was won the Knight News Challenge, run by the Knight Foundation, providing support to build a more robust, scalable version of the proof of concept system.〔(Knight Foundation Grants )〕 In 2014 WeFarm was an overall winner of the Google Impact Challenge, providing funding to launch WeFarm in several different countries around the world and take it to scale.〔(Google Impact Challenge )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「WeFarm」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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