Africa may continue to lag behind the rest of the world in battling poverty, hunger and HIV/AIDS but it is making dramatic progress in communications. Mobile phone subscribers leaped from 16 million in 2000 to over 250 million in 2007 and the use of SMS for business is radically improving incomes for the continent's 380 million poor.

Now farmer groups across Tanzania broker have gone one step further by accessing market information via the internet with an experimental solid state computer.

Trade leads, mapping, price differentials, microfinance and SMS integration might sound like the vocabulary of a city slicker, but not to these Tanzanians now that they are part of the 'First Mile Project', a UN backed approach which is bringing futures trading to remote areas of the Southern Highlands in Tanzania.

Broker Bahati Tweve now seeks out deals on TradeNet, africa's first mobile2mobile trading platform for farmers and traders. It's a sophisticated online database of market intelligence, the largest and most advanced market information platform in Africa. Buyers from all over the world place orders on the database allowing local farmers to better plan what to grow and to whom, where and when to sell. All of which is helping poor rural farmers to cope with rising food prices.