African farmers and traders can do business by text

mob_sms
Originally uploaded by smstextnews.

This is rather neat.

Link: Ghana: Facility for Trade Through Mobile Phone Launched

Mr Mark Davies, the architect of the website, said the service was operating in 12 countries and 300 markets in Africa and in some countries in South America. He said the tradenet facility basically provided a platform for sellers in agricultural business to display their profiles and information on their commodities, prices and locations on the Internet, with the view to attracting potential buyers through the net. He said the facility also offered individuals and traders associations the opportunity to establish their own website within the tradenet platform at not cost to constantly display their commodities and prices.

The Tradenet.biz service as a whole has already reportedly traded US$ 350m:

He assured potential users that the platform was effectively protected from fraud. Dr Kofi Debrah, Chief Coordinator of the USAID project, said since the introduction of tradenet, various participating buyers and sellers had chalked a trans-border trade value to 350 million dollars.

Very cool.