National agricultural advisory, at the last mile.
The Institut de Conseil et d'Appui Technique is the national body responsible for agricultural extension across Togo. Its mandate is to put practical agronomic knowledge into the hands of producers, technicians, and cooperatives, in regions where the cost of advisory services has historically been measured in hours of travel rather than minutes of mobile data.
FAO Togo, under the Pro-SADI programme (Strengthening Food Systems for Sustainable Smallholder Access to Agricultural Inputs), commissioned PANEOTECH to redevelop and scale the existing e-Agriconseil+ platform. The mandate was clear. The previous version was technologically obsolete, the source code was no longer recoverable, and rural connectivity made any web-only design unworkable for the producers and field technicians the platform was meant to serve.
The mandate. Rebuild the platform from the ground up around offline-first operation, multilingual audio content for low-literacy users, and a content management system that gives ICAT full editorial autonomy, with formal capacity transfer and documented handover to the institution.
One platform for producers, technicians, and the institution.
PANEOTECH delivered three coordinated components. A native mobile application for producers and field technicians, designed for full offline operation. A content management back-office for ICAT administrators, giving them autonomous control over the entire knowledge base. And the data engineering work to consolidate fifteen prioritised value chains into one structured, searchable corpus. The mobile application is published on the Google Play Store and live nationwide.
Offline-First Mobile Application
Native cross-platform application running on Android and iOS, including entry-level devices common in rural Togo. Local database lets users download the entire knowledge base for offline consultation, with transparent background synchronisation when connectivity returns.
Audio Content in Four Local Languages
Studio-quality audio versions of advisory content in Ewe, Kabye, Moba, and Tem, with adaptive streaming that adjusts quality to available bandwidth. Designed for users with limited literacy who cannot rely on written content alone.
Structured Knowledge Base
Over 300 technical sheets covering 15 prioritised value chains, extracted from heterogeneous source documents, normalised, and integrated into a coherent searchable corpus. The data engineering work alone consolidated more than one gigabyte of unstructured material into a usable institutional asset.
Content Management Back-Office
Web administration platform giving ICAT full control over content authoring, media uploads, user account management, technician enrolment, and usage statistics, including bulk import of technician records through spreadsheet upload.
The application supports producers searching the knowledge base by crop or topic, listening to audio advisories in their preferred local language, and locating qualified field technicians by name or geographic zone. Technicians use the same application as a daily reference and a tool for direct producer engagement.
Built for 2G connectivity and entry-level devices.
The technology choices follow directly from the connectivity reality of rural Togo. Cross-platform native mobile, a strict offline-first data layer, adaptive audio streaming, and a backend designed for resilient synchronisation rather than continuous connectivity. Every architectural decision was tested against the question of whether it would work on a low-end Android phone in a 2G coverage area.
Cross-platform native mobile
The mobile application is built with a single codebase that compiles to native Android and iOS, ensuring smooth performance on entry-level devices and broad device compatibility across the range of phones actually used by the target audience.
Strict offline-first data layer
An embedded local database stores the full knowledge base on the user's device. A differential synchronisation engine reconciles local and remote state when connectivity is detected, transparently to the user, so the application never blocks on network availability.
Adaptive audio streaming
Multilingual audio content is delivered through HTTP Live Streaming with multiple bitrates. The client adjusts dynamically to available bandwidth, keeping audio playback usable on 2G connections and recovering smoothly on intermittent links.
Resilient backend
A Node.js backend exposes a secure REST API over a document-oriented database that handles the heterogeneous structure of agricultural advisory content. Authentication uses signed tokens, sensitive data is encrypted in transit, and the backend is hosted on a managed cloud environment with high availability.
Built for the operational reality of rural Togo.
Capacity transfer was built into the engagement from the start. A two-day intensive training session at the ICAT Directorate brought together a strategic committee of seven institutional leads, including the project division head, IT staff, statisticians, and agronomists, identified as the future administrators of the platform. Training covered the full administration cycle, from crop and technical sheet management through media integration and user permissions to the operational dashboards that support daily oversight. Administration and user manuals were delivered as the durable reference for future operations.
Partners and institutional ownership.
e-Agriconseil+ was delivered by PANEOTECH for FAO Togo under the Pro-SADI programme, with the Institut de Conseil et d'Appui Technique as the implementing institution and operational owner. The mobile application is live on the Google Play Store and ICAT teams now operate the platform autonomously, with full administrative control over content, technician enrolment, and analytics. A formal warranty and maintenance phase consolidated the handover, addressing operational feedback from the administrator training and confirming the institution's independent capacity to run the system.
