Developing an SMS-based mobile application in the food supply chain in Zambia

摘要

An SMS-based mobile application can be used by cooperatives to link traders and farmers, and to reduce exposure of traders to road traffic accidents, loss of cash, lives and commodities. This will reduce the cost of doing business. A survey was conducted in Lusaka and Livingstone, where 35.25% of the total number of respondents obtained food commodities from outside their locality. The risks were associated with travel, where 30.5% of the respondents lost commodities, and 91.6% travelled with large sums of cash. Further, 50.4% of the respondents use mobile money and 75.25% use mobile phones when trading. A mobile application, called Smart Trader System was then developed using NetBeans IDE, MySQL database and Java development kit for Windows. This system interacts with the mobile phone for the traders via SMS. It has been implemented and tested. This application will reduce the cost of doing business among the farmers and traders.