Bettie Kawonga

Bettie's Story When I was pursuing a master's degree in Malawi, I Co-developed a Cow performance monitoring (CPM) Tool (a performance monitoring curve with Upper, Meddle and Low performance lines) as an early warning for sub-optimal performance & health or reproduction issues in lactating cows) with smallholder rural dairy farmers (mostly women who constitute over 60% of dairy farmers and majority (80% of these) are in the low literacy rate bracket). The innovative CPM tool works best for these women because it uses a PICTURE, which is easily understood by these women to monitor their animal performance on a day-to-day basis. Currently, I want to transform this into an e-tool that can be downloaded onto the farmers mobile phone for ease of data entry and visualization. This will simplify the women's work & the cost associated with the paper-based CPM Tool; however, I lack the technical know-how hence my interest with coding to acquire the coding skills to achieve my goal of developing low-cost technologies for efficient operations in low-income settings