Facebook for Farmers: Technology Empowers China’s Rural Workers
Monday, December 20, 2010
China Mobile’s Nongxintong – or farming information service – launched four years ago. The company is currently focusing on expanding its delivery in China’s west and south-west regions.
“Building the mobile network and covering most of the country’s administrative villages, we realised that there was only a network signal. In rural areas, this is not enough,” explains Liu Jing, a local manager for the service at China Mobile.
“It’s like having a highway and no cars!”
Indeed, while most farming households in China now have mobile phones, very few have internet. So their main source for information was via television – that is, if they could be bothered to watch serious programming after a day out in the fields.
So, China Mobile created Nongxintong to deliver information and news directly to the farmer via their mobiles.