Include Everyone in the Degital Society

Trainees expressed great interest in
harvesting strawberries for the first time

NEC is proceeding with trials toward commercializing an agricultural business in India with two aims. One is to help impoverished women in rural India to escape poverty by generating incomes from cultivating top-quality Japanese strawberries. The other is to establish support for agriculture as a business for NEC.
The business partners in this initiative are the Institute of Cultural Affairs Japan, an NPO that is helping to improve living standards in rural India, and GRA Inc., an agricultural production organization that helped the town of Yamamoto in Miyagi Prefecture recover from the devastation of the Great East Japan Earthquake by using ICT to grow high-quality strawberries. A test facility on the outskirts of Pune, Maharashtra, in western India has started steady shipments of strawberries.

NEC is providing greenhouses, various sensors and other equipment for the test facility as well as information that is essential for developing cultivation expertise that matches local environmental conditions through cloud services.

Hiroki Iwasa
Representative Director and CEO, GRA Inc.

This project began with the initiatives of NEC on Miyako Island, a remote island in Okinawa Prefecture, Japan. The island in recent years has witnessed its natural environment, including its coral reefs, being gradually destroyed, and one of the major causes has been problematic soil runoff from sugarcane fields into the ocean. NEC explored the potential of developing agricultural structures using abandoned schools and airports into a powerful industry that could replace sugarcane production, and felt that this idea could be used to improve living conditions in India’s farming villages.
But then came the Great East Japan Earthquake and the project was suspended as efforts were directed toward assisting in the disaster region. It was here that NEC met with the GRA Inc., completely by chance. Strawberry farmers with 50 years of experience and expertise teamed up with IT engineers involved in helping the disaster-hit region recover from the massive damage inflicted by the tsunami to create facilities for high-quality strawberry cultivation in a short period of time. NEC quickly joined forces with the Institute of Cultural Affairs Japan and GRA and in just two months commenced strawberry farming in India.
With this kind of alliance, in the case of normal business, it takes a great deal of time for decisions to be made. The reason why this project was able to get off the ground so quickly was the sense of social mission among all three parties－the desire to solve a social problem－so we were able to forge an extremely open relationship.

Harvesting strawberries

With this project, everything that was needed for commercialization, from land provision to greenhouse construction and strawberry cultivation, harvesting and shipping, would basically be performed by local residents. It was important for the community itself to possess the awareness and responsibility required of a business owner. Ultimately, our role in helping the project succeed was to provide ICT technologies and agricultural expertise.
Strawberries have been cultivated in India for some time, but they have typically been grown outdoors, and unlike Japanese strawberries they are hard and sour and so have not been popular. This project is using a Yamamoto strawberry variety that is renowned for its deliciousness and high quality. The strawberries are grown in fully enclosed greenhouses to reduce vulnerability to disease and insect damage associated with outdoor farming and minimize the use of agrochemicals.
The greenhouses use simple cooling devices incorporating water pads to maintain proper temperatures. Instead of soil, the growing beds comprise coco peat, from crushed coconut shells. The essential nutrients for growing are supplied automatically by a sensor-based management system. Furthermore, an ICT setup was deployed so villages could swiftly obtain cultivation guidance remotely directly from agricultural technique specialists in Yamamoto when unsure about decisions on cultivation methods.
Using ICT to easily link simple production facilities and advanced cultivation expertise has enabled rural women to grow high-quality strawberries without needing expertise and a large initial investment.

Trainees enjoy the delicious taste of the
high-quality Yamamoto strawberry variety

Traditionally, agricultural produce had to go through many intermediaries before shipping to market in India. Such an approach damaged a lot of produce, resulting in large distribution losses. The lack of a direct sales route from villages to city markets wasn’t solely to blame. Another reason was that conventional growing techniques meant that farmers couldn’t make a commitment to sell their crops to end users because they were unable to estimate the timing and volume of harvests. NEC resolved this problem by using ICT to manage cultivation, thereby ensuring planned harvesting of produce and stabilizing quality and using direct contracts to enable direct deliveries to luxury hotels in Pune. The hotels can thereby consistently sell fresh and tasty strawberries to wealthy customers.
There are two merits for NEC in supporting the development of markets for high-quality produce through its agricultural solutions. The first is that this approach is a means to people escaping from poverty. The second is that creating markets can generate new business opportunities for NEC. For social contributions to produce their intended results, the sustainability of projects as businesses is essential. In this sense, we feel the project is well on its way to commercialization. We believe our initiatives in India can also be applied to the project on Miyako Island. For NEC, a company striving to become a “Social Value Innovator,” it will be a litmus test.

An NEC employee gives an explanation to
H.E. Mrs. Natalia Pedro da Costa Umbelina Neto,
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Corporation and Communities
of the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe

The Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) is held every five years with the participation of African countries, development partner countries, and a host of organizations that include international institutions and the private sector. The latest conference, held June 1-3, 2013 in Yokohama, was spearheaded by the Japanese government and co-sponsored by the United Nations, United Nations Development Programme, The African Union Commission and The World Bank. It was fifth such conference, the first of which was held in 1993.
At this official event, NEC exhibited security solutions that incorporate fingerprint authentication and facial recognition technologies that are among the most precise in the world, as well as space solutions, which collect detailed data via satellite and use advanced analytical technology to assist in forecasting and situational assessments for environmental monitoring, resource exploration and meteorological and disaster monitoring. These technologies are expected to solve a range of social issues in Africa as well as contribute to the region’s business development.
NEC has been involved in social infrastructure development in 52 African countries, going back to 1963, from communications and broadcasting to postal services. Many NEC products—phone exchange equipment, satellite earth stations, microwave communications facilities, broadcasting equipment and more—continue to be valued and used all over the continent even today. In post-apartheid South Africa, we provided a national ID system that uses world-class fingerprint identification. The system is used for identification in various settings, including public services such as election registration and pension supply-and-demand management, and it has helped to improve the lives of the South African people.

In 2011, NEC split its overseas business unit into five regions: Greater China, APAC (Asia-Pacific), EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), North America, and Latin America. We now develop global operations through regional headquarters established in each of these five regions. To promote local business leadership, we are accelerating the transfer of authority to local overseas subsidiaries while appointing more local staff to management positions. The goal is to drive business expansion through speedy decision-making.
In conjunction with these efforts, NEC Africa (Pty) Ltd. was established in Johannesburg, South Africa, to serve as the headquarters for business development in 49 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Operations got underway in December 2011. Under its umbrella, we established NEC Nairobi as a liaison office for East Africa in Kenya and NEC West Africa Limited in Nigeria to handle the West African region. The companies are strengthening business development throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.
The major countries of the Sub-Saharan region, which include South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya, are politically stable and expect to see demand growth for communications infrastructure associated with more widespread use of mobile phones as well as accelerated development of security-related social infrastructure as their economies develop going forward.

The president of NEC Africa meets with his staff.

Region by region, Africa is ethnically and linguistically diverse. For example, South Africa alone has 11 official languages. Because of this diversity, mutual communication is a must, and NEC is able to demonstrate its strength in this area.
NEC is working in this region to develop infrastructure that includes PASOLINK and communications facilities for transmitting mobile phone signals and is thereby helping eliminate poverty caused by the digital divide and contributing to societal stability through the promotion of mechanisms that facilitate effective communication.
Last year, NEC Africa launched a dedicated public safety team with a view to future business development. With monitoring and access control that incorporates our world-class facial recognition technology, we hope to broadly contribute to African communities by providing high value-added solutions for realizing a safe and secure society.