Think, an international nonprofit think-tank focused on circulating digital technologies for development, launched a glitzy mobile innovation, CellBazaar, aimed at improving agriculture in Bangladesh, with the tag-line “the market in your mobile phone”.

Over a million people have signed-up and upwards of 250 million regularly use it.

CellBazaar is touted as a virtual marketplace, for GrameenPhone’s 20 million mobile subscribers, where demand and supply are brought together. This is important to the extent that market prices are commonly debased by poor transport infrastructure that increases costs.

To use CellBazaar, adopters will post the produce they wish to sell via a mobile phone, which will be fed into an online platform. The mobile element is important as internet penetration in Bangladesh is extremely low, roughly 0.03%. The mobile-enabled technology that powers this innovation also overcomes literacy challenges by utilizing voice messages to read out posts.

By expanding market opportunities for traders and farmers , CellBazaar will allow previously marginalized agricultural enterprises to flourish: earning larger profits and selling in bulk from a more advantageous position due to reduced costs.

While this technology tackles marketing, a major challenge to farmers around the globe, there are many other elements within the agricultural sector that ought to be improved to ensure sustained development and food security: harvesting, packaging, storing, and transporting. In a subsequent article, I will examine these issues as I take an in depth look at the food crisis currently crippling parts of the Horn of Africa.

CellBazaar is slated to expand to developing markets similar to Bangladesh, particularly East Africa and South Asia.

Learn more about CellBazaar here.