| dc.description.abstract | Sustainable poverty reduction in developing nations, such as Kenya, is only achievable through economic growth and development strategies where agriculture is considered as a key driver. This is because agriculture contributes to about 45% of the GDP of developing countries, with more than 75% of their population relying on agriculture for employment. It is only important that these countries focus on how to improve agriculture by making it knowledge intensive as oppose to our intensive as it is currently. This implies that factors such as policy and legal framework, technology and knowledge management, markets, research among others must be comprehensively explored. In all these. ICT can act as a catalyst to facilitate their incorporation into agriculture. Arguably, hunger and poverty is concentrated in developing countries due to poor capacity to develop, to access and to manage agricultural information and knowledge. This is owed to disconnect that exist between the eAgricultural products available in the market and the information needs of the farmers. To address this challenge, there is need to integrate information required by the farmers from the diverse sources such as agricultural stakeholders into a single information access point. Such an access point need to be pervasive enough to provide anywhere anytime and any device information access while meeting the need to avail timely, relevant, accurate and consumable information to farmers. Developing such a single information access point for farmers to support their decision making in attempt to improve agricultural productivity as the goal of this research. Specific objective were to: establish the information needs of the farmers and how to meet them; develop an optimal strategy, so called consortium that leverages the contributions from agricultural stakeholders to support farmers' needs; illustrate practical operation of the formulated stakeholders' consortium using tools such as mathematical analysis and simulations; and to develop an integrated eAgriculture framework to support farmers' needs. Owing to potential conflicting and competing interests when desiring that various stakeholders cooperate and collaborate, game theoretic approach was employed to formulate this model so as be able to tame selfish interests from the stakeholders. It was shown that there is always a point: value where all stakeholders are satisfied and hence contribute optimally to the consortium. For instance, considering 20 million farmers and about 950 stakeholders in some hypothetical case, consortium was easily formulated with just 337 stakeholders including the farmers. This was the ground on which the proposed eAgriculture framework was built with objective of promoting innovative use of ICT. The framework incorporates an agricultural data center that filters information from both local and global content producers using machine learning algorithms and other tools such as human computing. Information retrieval system is incorporated in the framework such that farmers can access more relevant contents in a simple format that is easy to consume. For sake of exhaustiveness, the framework has also taken advantage of big data available on the internet and social network to enrich the agricultural data center. This study established that improving agricultural productivity and making Kenya food secure requires a multidisciplinary research approach. The proposed framework eAgriculture framework is an information manager ma: gives ideal interaction of stakeholders for optimal exploitation of available JCT tools. To this end, there in need to formulate policies in regard to managing data center proposed in the framework, that is issues relating to trusted cloud provider, data security and building user reputation levels. | en_US |