The objective of Trade at Hand, an ITC service, is to enable exporters from developing economies to make innovative use of mobiles phoness. The service began by serving exporters of agricultural products and has since expanded to other sectors, as well. Since 2006, Trade at Hand projects have led to the creation of four solutions.

• Market Prices

  or 'mPrices', which sends out product prices on international markets in real time via short message service (SMS)

• Market Alerts

  or 'mAlerts', which is a Web-to-SMS tool that enables business support organizations to transmit business opportunities, contacts and market news to targeted business people

• mobiles Data Collection

  or 'mCollect', which allows the collection of national market prices and enables food-security institutions to use the SMS channel to gather price information from their networks of rural market-price collectors

• mobiles Marketplace

  which offers a virtual marketplace to small-scale producers who have access to a mobiles phones and enables them to advertise their products to big buyers, including exporters

Key points of T@H

The project is based on a clear and long-term strategy that includes:

1. Providing appropriate and sustainable mobiles-based information and communication technologies to build capacities of beneficiaries and enhance their business competitiveness.
2. Setting up and maintaining a sustainable business model based on telecommunication income- sharing, a knowledge centre and solution platform, in order to facilitate replication, provide hosting and respond to the related assistance needs of beneficiaries.
3. Establishing partnerships with relevant public and private organizations to fuel the first two strategy points and increase ITC’s impact in the field.
4. Maintaining constant research and development activity to continue offering appropriate solutions to beneficiaries, including by capturing the beneficiary network experience and sharing lessons learned.