Abstract:
Significant interruptions in the food supply system caused by the novel COVID-19
pandemic have worsened the severe problems of malnutrition and nutritional
deficiency. As a lesson learnt from such crises, home gardening is a cost-effective
option to handle food and nutritional insecurity and supply sufficient food for the
growing population. Nevertheless, all gardeners are not farmers, and the lack of an
easy mechanism to find gardening instructions causes beginners to do away from
gardening. Therefore, a study was conducted to provide useful information via a
mobile app named “Govi-Nena” (for Android and iOS platforms). The design science
research (DSR) approach was used to develop packages of practice (PoP) workbooks
for home garden crops. The DSR methodology consists of 3 basic cycles; Relevance,
Rigor and Design. The study was started with the rigor cycle and gathered information
from reliable and publicly available sources to create initial artefacts. Additional
requirements were collected from domain experts in the application domain of the
relevance cycle. The PoP workbooks have been verified and validated by experts
during a number of field visits and enhanced the artefact in the design cycle. In order
to test the PoP knowledge satisfaction on a 5-point Likert scale method, a pre-tested
Google form-based questionnaire was distributed among 32 Govi-Nena mobile app
users and analyzed using Wilcoxon one sample signed-rank test. All users were
delighted (p <0.05) with the information provided in the app, especially agro-climatic
zone-based crop variety selection, choosing fertilizer types, amount, quality, accuracy
and user-friendliness of information, and other pre-planting, growing and harvesting
practices. Obviously, this potentially useful tool provides context-specific, complete,
and actionable information through the convenient app that assists home gardeners
in making informed decisions on crop production, eventually support to meet the
growing demand for food security in the country.
