WORK is far advanced on the development of a Rural Agricultural Development Authority (RADA) software which is expected to better help the police apprehend praedial thieves.

The application, which is being developed by a group of fellows through the entity Code for the Caribbean, is expected to be available early in the new year.

Designer in residence David Soutar said while the application will by no means eliminate praedial larceny, which is a $5 billion-a-year problem, it will certainly assist the police to verify information during stop and search operations. According to him, law enforcers will be able to send text messages to an automated system to ascertain whether agricultural produce was purchased from farmers registered with RADA and Jamaica Agricultural Society (JAS).

“A police officer will do random spot checks of a market truck and they will request a receipt and this would have the farmer’s ID number as well as the items that have been sold,” he explained.

“Currently, the officer will either call police control and someone will have a terminal that allows them access to RADA’s database and they will put in the number and search for the information. But there are issues involved with that because, depending on what is happening at control, they may not get a fast enough turn around time; so having an automated system for them to text in a number and get an immediate response will make a world of difference,” he said of what now obtains.

With the new system, Soutar said the receipt number would be sent via text message to a server which queries the database and immediately pulls up the information and relays it in like manner.

“The database will pull up the information to say if this receipt belongs to a registered farmer and what he is registered to produce and the police can see if the farmer is registered to grow banana and if this is a truck full of banana this is most likely to be a valid transaction,” he said.

This, according to Soutar, will make it more difficult for thieves to pawn off stolen goods as legitimate.

Fellow and developer in residence Varun Baker in expounding on how the application will work said it will utilise very simple tools that people already have in their possession such as a regular cellphone.

“So, maybe a butcher is able to send a quick SMS message which is based on the receipt book system that already exists and which gives a traceability to agricultural produce and livestock. So once there is a receipt for goods he can text in that receipt number and get back the farmer information and be able to verify it,” Baker said.

It is hoped that the technology being created can be reproduced for other problems.

“The system for RADA where information is sent via text messages and a response received is something in a generic sense that can be repurposed for other problems throughout the government,” Soutar said.

He further noted that the pieces of technology being created are all open source and as such will be publicly available for government to use.

The praedial larceny software is just one of several pieces being developed under the Code for the Caribbean’s six-month pilot.

According to Soutar, another delivery of the fellowship will be an API which is an interface which will allow any team of developers to access RADA’s data and develop other applications.

“Even with the creation of this SMS (text message) application we will first create that API so that long after this fellowship is over new teams can then become involved and even internally within RADA they can create new applications using it,” Soutar told the Jamaica Observer.

He further explained that such applications will be helpful to several other government partners and cited tourism as one area where it would be very effective.

“If the Ministry of Tourism had information on the inflow of tourists going into hotels, if you wanted to cross-reference that information with the amount of food being consumed you could have some very interesting statistics which would allow various ministries and stakeholders to make better informed decisions,” he said.

Meanwhile, programme manager at Code for the Caribbean Afifa Harris said the entity seeks to partner with government agencies and ministries to help them improve their service delivery and some of their systems through the use of technology.

She noted that such things as budgetary constraints and procurement procedures can limit Government innovations and as such, Code for the Caribbean has sought to form partnerships with some agencies to improve service delivery and technology.

The RADA project is the pilot of what, it is hoped, will be a full roll-out of similar initiatives.

Harris said the three fellows were recruited to work with RADA as the state agency ramps up measures to thwart praedial larceny.

“There is a technical department within RADA and people who have been working on this problem. However, we believe we that we can offer certain approaches that will help to identify aspects that could be addressed that would reduce the problem,” she said.

“We have a developer – someone who writes code, makes software, makes applications; and then we have a designer – somebody who then makes the interface and one of the things we can do is to see how we can use technological innovation to help to reduce that problem,” she further explained.

According to Harris, the soon-to-be completed application will also be helpful to extension officers.

Managing Director of Code for the Caribbean Matthew McNaughton said the motivation for this pilot is to create space for working with forward-thinking government partners in solving some of the important problems which exist and finding new ways to approaching them.

“The idea is for this to be a regional initiative and so the idea is to do this pilot to kind of introduce the model to learn the lessons of how it works then to do it next year at a national scale to work with maybe two to four government partners at the same time with 10-12 fellows,” he explained.

He further noted that the traditional approach to thinking about service delivery does not allow the government to experiment without committing a significant amount of resources and this is where Code for the Caribbean will be able to help.

“We might be able to use this to look at how we run the hospitals as this is just one particular problem space with RADA which could work for another; and so the Members of Parliament might be able to use it in their constituencies as they may want to gauge citizens in managing the CDF (Constituency Development Fund) so it is something which could be leveraged in a number of different areas,” McNaughton said.

According to McNaughton, there will be a period of evaluation after the completion of this pilot, and a reaching out to different government partners who might be interested in a scaled-up version of the programme.

” In this case we worked with RADA because we had a good relationship, but going forward we do want it to be something 9in which) agencies apply to participate so they can show they have a commitment to doing things differently,” he said.