Altai Moving Forward – News & Innovations

Ramallah Office Opening

Altai Consulting recently opened a new office in the center of Ramallah. The office is the central point of Altai Consulting’s developments in the West Bank and Gaza. Our teams, combining local researchers and international project managers, are currently conducting research projects in the West Bank.

Mobile for Development

With its expertise of the telecom industry (see Corporate Practice/Telecom & Media) and a strong background in Aid & Development projects, Altai Consulting is at the crossroads of the initiatives that combine mobile technologies and social development. After having been involved in the pre-launch and post-launch review of m-Paisa, the mobile banking solution developed by Roshan in Afghanistan, Altai Consulting is currently supporting the pilot phase of the innovative Tradenet project.

Tradenet: Pilot research - Afghan farmers receiving market information on their mobile

Mercy Corps, a leading non-profit organization engaged in Afghanistan since 1986, and Roshan, the leading GSM provider in Afghanistan, recently teamed up with Tradenet* on an initiative that aims to provide accurate and up-to-date market information to rural farmers. The service disseminates information directly to farmers' mobile phones on a wide variety of agriculture commodities and markets. The initiative is the first of its kind in Afghanistan where access to daily agriculture pricing information is difficult to obtain and often unreliable; it allows rural farmers better access to market information by signing-up for SMS alerts for commodities and markets that they are interested in, and that way improves their situation in the predominantly buyers’ market.

In order to optimize the project launch, Mercy Corps and Roshan tapped Altai Consulting to conduct a number of case studies, focus groups and surveys to accompany the pilot phase of the project. The research aims at identifying upstream issues related to barriers of adoption and cultural-specific localizations needed to increase the level of adoption among the largely illiterate rural agriculture farmers targeted by the service. Given the outlying cultural sensitivities within the Afghanistan context, the importance of localizing products and services to the needs of the Afghan market is a crucial step towards ensuring the successful implementation of such innovative initiatives. The social and market research conducted by Altai Consulting and the strategic recommendations provided, allowed Mercy Corps and Roshan to adapt the service to meet local demand related to both content and technical specificities which were subsequently integrated into the second phase of the project, in anticipation of full commercial rollout to occur during the upcoming year.

*Tradenet is an innovative agriculture market information platform already developed successfully across 12 countries in West Africa.