Abstract
The study investigates the key motivational driver(s) for the acceptance of a digital procurement (e-purjee) system by sugarcane growers in rural Bangladesh. The e-purjee system is a simple SMS-based purchase order system that replaces a paper-based procurement order system. Treating the acceptance of the e-purjee system as the sugarcane growers‟ decision problem, and applying a multi-criteria decision making (Zionts & Wallenius, 1976) approach to that problem, the study identifies the trade-offs growers appear to make between non-monetary and monetary decision criteria. The study draws on interviews with local growers to reveal their preferences and their reasoning. The findings indicate that non-monetary incentives, namely procedural fairness and uncertainty reduction, are more important than the positive monetary benefits. Interview responses also suggest that the non-monetary benefits affect small scale growers more than the large scale growers. Based on these findings, we draw several practical and theoretical recommendations about the structuring of incentive systems for rural technology based development projects, and about decision modeling for a relatively untrained informant group.
Recommended Citation
Alam, Md. Mahbubul and Wagner, Christian, "Motivating Acceptance of Information and Communication Technologies in Rural Agribusiness: It’s Not the Money!" (2013). GlobDev 2013. 14.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/globdev2013/14