Kenya Agricultural Commodity Exchange
Kenya Agricultural Commodity Exchange (KACE) was launched in 1997 to offer two main services targeted at smallholder poor farmers: market information collection and dissemination, and commodity exchange through matching offers (sell) and bids (buy). And since then, KACE has been developing and testing a market information and (market) linkage system (MILS) designed to make agricultural markets work better (more efficiently) for farmers, especially targeting smallholder farmers. MILS provide reliable and timely market information as well as links farmers to better markets through matching commodity offers and bids.
The KACE MILS involves harnessing modern ICTs to empower farmers with low-cost reliable and timely market information to enhance the bargaining power of the farmer for a better price in the market place, and to link the farmer to markets more efficiently and profitably. The components of the KACE MILS are:
§ Rural based Market Information Points (MIPs)
§ District-level Market Information Centres (MICs)
§ Mobile Phone Short Messaging Service (SMS)
§ Interactive Voice Response (IVR) service
§ Internet based database system
§ Mass media
In order to improve access by farmers and other small and medium agro-enterprises (SMEs) to input and output markets in a financially affordable and sustainable way, KACE has recently initiated two innovations: franchising its MIPs and MICs to local entrepreneurs, and establishing a virtual trading floor to improve the matching of offers and bids through a rural-based FM Radio program.
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