Design and Evaluation of Intelligent Commodity Market Information Monitoring System for Rural Farmers and Traders in Ethiopia

Abstract

Market information in Ethiopia is not readily available to rural farmers and traders. Currently, the existing market system allows intermediaries to decide the market price of the product unfavourably to the farmers. On the other hand, traders cannot not access marketoriented commodities that can be sold at good prices. This paper attempts to design SMS (short message service) based intelligent market information monitoring system that acts as a platform where farmers and traders can share market information in various market domains.
The development of the system followed a Rapid Application Development (RAD) approach where testing and evaluation is performed for accuracy, efficiency, usability, acceptance and performance on two crucial aspects of the system: SMS gateway and Query Understanding Engine (QUE). The evaluation and test result of the system is promising. It is found to be that 95% (Accuracy), 89.2% (efficiency), 90.21 (SUS score) and 3.9 seconds (Mean Average performance/speed) is registered. Moreover, User Acceptance Testing (UAT) evaluation showed
that it is ‘Accepted’ for use. It showed that such kinds of systems can solve the problems of lack of easily accessible market information by rural farmers and traders this shows that the system can contribute significantly to improving the accessibility of market information for rural farmers and traders in Ethiopia.

Keywords: Commodity Market, Market Information, User Acceptance Testing (UAT), Rural Farmers