Learning and sharing in communication
for rural development

Hi everyone! I'm Aldo Lim from the College of Development Communication, University of the Philippines Los Baños. My collegue and research adviser, Cleofe Torres, invited me here to share my masters thesis on mobile phone appropriation among coffee farmers of Amadeo, Cavite, Philippines. I also presented this paper at the AMIC Conference last year (and hope to publish it as a journal article this year). As you know, in the Philippines, agriculture is the largest and most critical sector. Moreover, the country is no stranger to ICT4D. Mobile phones have established a presence even in developing rural areas. They have been integrated in agricultural information delivery, especially in rice farming (as Ronan has shared in this discussion). However, the benefits of I-C-Ts have yet to be fully realized when it comes to local coffee production, an agricultural sector that used to be globally recognized as an industry player. The lack of e-agriculture initiatives in coffee farming was seen as a ripe opportunity to generate empirical data on local mobile phone practices. Inspired by FAO's "Revisiting the Black Box: Case Studies in Local Appropriation of ICTs," I set out to analyze how coffee farmers of Amadeo, Cavite -- the coffee capital of the Philippines -- have appropriated mobile phones. I used Wirth, von Pape, and Karnowski's Integrative Model of Mobile Phone Appropriation as my framework. Coffee farmers of Amadeo, Cavite were mostly male, married, and in their mid-to-late...