Agriculture

Client: Cocoa Board of Papua New Guinea / Coffee Industry Corporation

Overview: The Productive Partnerships in Agriculture Project (PPAP) is a World Bank-funded agriculture sector development project designed to improve the livelihoods of smallholder cocoa and coffee producers through the improvement of the performance and the sustainability of value chains. The project is managed through two Project Management Units (PMUs), one for each Cocoa and Coffee sector. The PMU selects several Lead Partners (LPs) through a Call for Proposals to set up a partnership. The LP partnerships are responsible for carrying out activities like baseline surveys, issuing of seedling and tools, training, record production on their project farmers. The PMU manages these partnerships by conducting regular training and reviews. It also reports to the World Bank on the performance of these partnerships.

Requirement: The PMU wanted to develop an MIS system to facilitate the operations of the PPAP project, improve data capture, monitor the progress and report to their donors.

Solution: To achieve this Protocol, IT Services Perth looked at all available options within the cloud environment, data centre storage and data replication between countries. The final design is a mixed environment combining virtual servers and cloud email services.

• The lead partners are located throughout the country and some partnerships are hard to reach by roads.


• The network communication facility in report areas are minimal or none.


• Exposure to Information technology and systems are very low in certain areas.

Solution: To overcome these challenges the MIS system should be very user-friendly and should work with or without the internet. Our initial study also showed the users are more familiar with mobile devices than a computer.

To tackle these problems the Protocol IT developed a system that works on computers, tablets, and mobile phones. The lead partners are given tablets to collect regular field data. These data collection tablets can work without the internet at any remote location and the captured data is uploaded into the lead partner’s system periodically. This helped the PMU to run the MIS system in all their lead partner contracts.

The main MIS system was developed using PHP and MySQL and hosted at the PMU and lead partner offices. A cloud portal was also set up for the lead partners with good internet and for stakeholder access. The tablet version of the software is developed for Android.