Author: Susan Thomas

Capturing Digital Green’s evolution in a new e-book published by Michigan State University

Posted on by Susan Thomas

The Michigan State University recently published a new e-book called Innovations in Agricultural Extension. This book emerged from the collaboration of extension experts attending the International Conference on Agricultural Extension: Innovation to Impact in February 2019. The book covers a wide range of topics in agricultural extension, from community outreach to the use of digital technologies. Digital Green staff Pritam Kumar Nanda and Archana Karanam, contributed to this book by authoring a chapter, The World is my Village. 

This chapter summarizes the evolution of Digital Green’s work in the digital extension realm, reimagined from the perspective of a field-level extension agent, Aarthi. Through Aarthi’s experiences and her own professional growth, the reader is able to learn about the technologies that Digital Green has been promoting to empower extension agents and create an ecosystem for an efficient flow of information to the farmers. The chapter describes Digital Green’s community video approach including video production, dissemination, and data management; the use of hybrid channels for sharing information with farmers; and virtual training platforms. The chapter concludes by acknowledging how the rapid changes in digital technologies provide new opportunities for extension agents to gain skills from the formal classrooms, as well as provide farmers the skills to use ICTs for agronomic decisions and market discoverability. 

We invite you to read The World is my Village and share your thoughts with us. Let us know how the use of ICTs and digital extension tools support agricultural extension in your community!

Fighting Desert Locust Together: Innovations and Solutions to Combat an Agrarian & Food Crisis

Posted on by Susan Thomas

On February 3, 2021, Feed the Future Developing Local Extension Capacity (DLEC) and ClimaCell.org hosted a webinar focusing on innovations and last-mile solutions to dealing with the desert locust crisis. We hosted this webinar because if it was not for COVID-19, the desert locust crisis would be the most significant challenge facing Africa this decade. The desert locust forms into swarms which are highly destructive: they can travel up to 150 km per day, damaging crops and fodder along the way and exacerbating food insecurity in parts of Africa. In 2020, swarms reached sizes as large as 1.5 times the size of New York City!

In the last few years, innovative technologies and last-mile solutions have emerged that could help prevent future desert locust attacks and support better monitoring of locust swarms and warning systems to support farmers. Georgina Campbell Flatter, Executive Director of ClimaCell.org, provided opening remarks highlighting the importance of aid to support farmers and pastoralists following locust attacks in early 2020, as well as the impressive progress and momentum in early warning and early action innovations like hyperlocal weather data, use of digital tools, and others.

Next, Marc Gilkey, Senior Agriculture Development Advisor at USAID Bureau of Resilience and Food Security, described the biology of the desert locust, how the swarms form, and swarm behavior as a cohesive entity. He emphasized the need for ongoing desert locust surveillance and control, as well as the use of technology, including locust reporting applications. Then, Boniface Akuku, Director of Information and Communication Technology of the Kenya Agriculture and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO), provided the perspective of the Government of Kenya. He emphasized the need to move from reactive to proactive approaches, including the use of digital platforms to share diverse data to predict and mitigate future desert locust attacks.

Following Ms. Akuku’s remarks, a panel discussed technology innovations for locust response. Yaev Motro, PhD, a locust expert, and Tomer Regev, CEO and Co-Founder of Alta Innovation, discussed the use of precision drone technology to identify desert locust locations and spray only those areas affected by locusts, while also minimizing the use of pesticides. They also talked about a recent trip to Ethiopia to share these technologies and coach Ethiopian locust warriors on how to use drone technology, sprayers, and use protective equipment. Dan Slagan and Rei Goffer from ClimaCell Inc. discussed the use of hyper-local weather data, integration of data sources, and specialized models to add precision to identifying when it is best to spray locust swarms. ClimaCell’s platform provides timely recommendations on when it would be the right day to spray based on numerous factors and conditions, as well as alerts via SMS or WhatsApp.

A second panel honed in on the last miles solutions to reach farmers. Emmah Mwangi, Agriculture Climate Research Manager for the Kenya Red Cross, recommended localized and context-specific data to strengthen early warning early action systems, as well as collaboration between diverse stakeholders and ongoing pilots to inform system development. Henry Kinyua, Head of East Africa, for Digital Green, talked about the use of customized videos as a way to reach farmers with information. He discussed the use of videos in the local language to disseminate information to fight the mango fruit fly in Kenya and how these videos can be delivered via multiple channels, including the trusted KALRO application. Ritika Sood, Senior Partner Relations Manager for Arifu, talked about their digital advisory platform, providing farmers with relevant agricultural information at no cost to farmers. She emphasized the need to work in partnership to get the subject matter content and customization needed to appropriately reach farmers.

Mr. Gilkey provided closing remarks, noting the importance of moving from analog to digital technologies and working in pluralistic partnerships to mitigate the multiple needs that emerge from the desert locust crisis. The webinar recording is accessible here.

Laying the Foundation of a National County Forum in Guinea

Posted on by Susan Thomas

On December 10, 2020, the Feed the Future Developing Local Extension Capacity (DLEC), the African Forum for Agricultural Advisory Services (AFAAS), and the West and Central Africa Network of Agricultural and Rural Advisory Services (RESCAR-AOC) organized a webinar on enhancing professionalization and partnerships in agricultural extension in West and Central Africa. This webinar, attended by 60 people, served two purposes: (1) to share findings and recommendations from a recently completed DLEC report on strengthening professionalization and partnerships in Guinea; and (2) to introduce the concept of a country forum to stakeholders in Guinea and the region. The webinar recording is available here.

Dr. Amadou Ndiaye, from RESCAR-AOC, provided opening remarks highlighting the importance of partnership and professionalization of agricultural extension. Dr. Kristin Davis, DLEC Co-Director, presented on pluralistic extension systems and lessons from DLEC’s work.  Next, Dr. Patrice Djamen, DLEC consultant, and Mr. Laye Sacko from the Guinean National Agency for Rural Promotion and Agricultural Advisory Services (ANPROCA), presented the findings and recommendations of the report, Strengthening Partnerships and Professionalization in Agricultural Extension in Guinea, which is available in English and French. Key recommendations include:

  • Strengthen the capacities of extension and advisory services (EAS) providers via a national capacity strengthening plan, training on managing partnerships, and improving communications between EAS providers
  • Improve the accessibility of information on EAS stakeholders and opportunities. An interactive platform should be set up for information sharing and knowledge management on stakeholders and EAS in Guinea.
  • Establish frameworks for consultation and exchanges. A national agricultural advisory forum, or country dforum, should be created to serve as an inclusive platform for the EAS actors to coordinate, exchange information, and explore opportunities.
  • Develop inclusive regulatory instruments such as a code of ethics, norms and standards, and others.
  • Update and enrich the training curricula for EAS providers to reduce the gap between current EAS and the new vision of professional EAS in Guinea.
  • Strengthen the awareness and capacities of EAS providers be strengthened for efficient and sustainable harnessing of the potential of ICTs.

After that, Mr. Max Olupot, partnership specialist for AFAAS, and Dr. Samson Eshetu, institutional capacity specialist for AFAAS, provided an overview of AFAAS, explained the role of a country forum vis-à-vis the regional and global forums for agricultural extension and how these work together, and described success factors for a country forum. A country forum is an inclusive platform or community of practice for different actors to coordinate, exchange information and knowledge and identify service delivery opportunities. It is also used to advocate for better investment in EAS and to develop relationships between national stakeholders and other continental and international initiatives.

Next, the moderator, Mr. Andri Rasoanindrainy led a moderated Q&A to explore the issues raised during the presentation in more depth. Dr. Aly Conde, Director General of ANPROCA, provided closing remarks summarizing key learnings from the webinar.

DLEC is setting the foundation of a national EAS country forum in Guinea, including hosting learning events such as this webinar, continue socializing the country forum concept to relevant stakeholders in Guinea, and holding participatory discussions on the mandate of the forum, its structure, and how to make it inclusive and sustainable. DLEC will work with RESCAR-AOC to continue supporting this nascent country forum.  We hope that this work has lasting influence in Guinea’s agricultural extension ecosystem and ultimately helps farmers receive pluralistic, timely, and robust agricultural extension services.

Future of Food Systems? Platform for Digital Food and Agriculture

Posted on by Susan Thomas

You may identify with this… On one of my first trips to a village in rural India, children would congregate in front of my camera, folks would peer into the few homes that had a television set, and a large line gathered in front of the village’s only payphone.

In less than a decade, smartphones that pack in-built cameras and social media apps have taken over much of those functions and costs have plummeted. The mobile revolution across Africa and South Asia is well known and accelerated by the pandemic, India now has more rural Internet users than urban.

But, there remain significant inequities. A recent study in Nature Sustainability found more than 75% of farms that were bigger than 200 ha had high-speed, 3G, or 4G connectivity but less than 30% of farmers with less than 1 ha did. Farms with the lowest yields and where farmers face the most climate-related shocks and food insecurity have even less digital connectivity.

Data has the power of connecting the dots to maximize our collective impact. Just like roads and electricity, data can serve as infrastructure to catalyze the next generation of agri-tech innovations.

Asia’s Green Revolution powered increases in rice and wheat yield through agricultural technologies like improved seeds and fertilizers and was most successful in irrigated areas. Digital technologies need to be contextualized to land on similarly fertile soil too.

Read this expert panel report of the Cornell Atkinson Sustainability Centre and Nature Sustainability on bundling socio-technical innovations for transforming agri-food systems.

The so-called developed and developing world divide won’t be closed by technology alone.  Physical infrastructure, human capital, political institutions, and finance are necessary foundations for the gains that technology can provide.

We need to go beyond seeing digital technologies as a silver bullet. Don’t get me wrong: the cornucopia of opportunities from artificial intelligence to blockchain to IoT is exciting and is quickly transforming agriculture into a knowledge-driven industry. But, transformative innovation necessarily involves bundling (i) scientific and engineering advances, with(ii) public policies, and (iii) private interventions. The opportunity we have is to align traditional agricultural research, business, and policymakers with the explosion of new agri-tech startups, venture capitalists, and telecom & cloud service providers.

No single organization has authority or control over even a significant part of the agri-food system, much less the whole. Rather, agri-food systems are highly decentralized and are likely to deconcentrate further as countries seek to boost the resilience of their national food security in the post-Covid era.  We also need to be wary of the inequities that technology can exacerbate, particularly when powerful interests capture its value & its data for themselves.

That’s what government and the broader agricultural sector now need to do: to flip agri-tech solutions that are developed from the top-down and where data is extracted from farmers today and instead empower farmers to control and share their own data in a unified way on their own terms.

To share an example, at Digital Green, we work with the Government of Ethiopia to use peer-to-peer videos by and for farmers to share best practices. As we do so, public extension agents collect data on what videos individual farmers watch and what practices they apply to their farms.

We have linked that data with a farmer hotline so that a farmer can listen to the same advice they watched during video screenings on their phones, but that was only made possible because of the partnerships that we established among ourselves. What if farmers themselves were able to access their own data that had been collected and decided who they wanted to share that with.

As the agricultural and telecom sectors continue to liberalize and expand, we’re co-creating an open-source platform, a digital FarmStack, to serve as the rails for countless applications across the value-chain that we cannot imagine from a growing ecosystem of government, NGO, tech, and agribusiness — and be inclusive of those big and just starting up. I’m personally most looking forward to seeing the ideas that farmers themselves come up with as they gain greater agency.

This platform can serve as an open architecture to codify governance policies and interoperability data standards that provides the necessary safeguards to protect the interests of farmers and the organizations that work with them. This will enable a wide variety of systems to talk to one another and seamlessly coordinate.

As Bill Gates once remarked, “a platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that creates it.”

Even as much will inevitably change, we know that there are some things that will remain the same.  Farmers — especially those most marginalized like women and youth — will undoubtedly want to earn more for their harvests and consumers will want more nutritious food that is more affordable and accessible.  Enabling their aspirations — even when they oppose one another — will remain our benchmark of success.

Co-creating an Industry Standard for Sharing Agricultural Data Globally

Posted on by Susan Thomas

2.5 billion smallholder farmers globally make daily decisions to protect their livelihoods and feed their communities. These farmers receive a staggering amount of information each day from government extension agents, private agribusinesses, and NGOs. With little coordination between these actors, farmers are given information and services that they didn’t demand and can’t use and are forced to make decisions about who they can trust. As climate change increasingly threatens production, and as supply chains are disrupted by crises like COVID-19, the divide between what is needed and what is offered continues to grow.

We have been working towards developing agri-tech solutions to boost the incomes of small-scale farmers. Building on more than ten years of experience with 2 million farmers across South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, we’re now leading the development of FarmStack, an agricultural data-sharing platform to enable organizations and individuals to transfer data through peer-to-peer connectors governed by usage policies that codify data sovereignty and control.

On August 20th,  we were invited along with Hewlett Packard Enterprise & Microsoft to participate in a World Bank led webinar series on ‘Co-creating an industry standard for sharing agricultural data globally’. The discussions focused on farmers and the organizations that serve them don’t have an easy and secure way to exchange data which leads to fragmentation and silos; and

  • We need to co-create a public infrastructure that automates the discovery, transfer, and transformation of agricultural data to address this challenge.

There will be two parts of the session; in the first part Rikin Gandhi, co-founder of Digital Green, will present the motivation & architecture of FarmStack with practical use cases. The second part will be a conversation with Lin Nease from Hewlett Packard Enterprises & Ranveer Chandra from Microsoft, on ways to co-create public infrastructure to automate the discovery, transfer, and transformation of agricultural data.

Rikin Gandhi from Digital Green shared the journey of why DG first decided to develop FarmStack, an agricultural data-sharing platform that enables data transfer through peer to peer connectors governed by usage policies that codify data sovereignty and control. He shared the vision for a decentralized architecture & how this effort fits alongside others (e.g., via CGIAR big data, GEMS, World Bank, HPE, GovLab, etc). With an example of a chili farmer in India, he shared how FarmStack can power multiple use cases (You can find his presentation here & a video link to an example use case here)

Rikin was then joined by Lin Nease from HPE, and Ranveer Chandra from Microsoft in a discussion on how each organization is trying to address challenges ranging from data discovery, privacy, security, and balancing incentives. Lin shared how they are supporting automated data discovery by developing data pipelines to enable easier exchange of data, data flow tracking, and data that is easier to find; & Ranveer shared Microsoft’s pioneering work with FarmBeats to make data more usable through visualizations & analytics, as well as more secure through Microsoft Azure’s Confidential Compute service for hardware-level encryption. They discussed the wide variation in availability and quality of data between the Global South and North.

Stewart Collis from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation highlighted the efforts of Gates Foundation & USAID to support the development of a supportive data ecosystem as a key enabling factor and encouraged all actors to consider how their actions and policies contribute to data governance norms and the emerging ecosystem. Laura Ralston from World Bank urged the group to look at data regulations & its implications, and find champions who can drive this effort forward.

Finally, Parmesh Shah from World Bank guided us through audience questions on implications of government policies (e.g., GDPR), the role of blockchain technology while continuing to highlight the importance of involving national and local governments in owning and sustaining such data-sharing platforms.

In case you missed it, you can watch the recording right here! We look forward to hearing your ideas and learning from your experience at contact@digitalgreen.org

A Youthful Vision of the Future of Food

Posted on by Susan Thomas

 

This week as the world celebrates World Food Day and International Day of Rural Women, the global community will come together to collectively focus our attention on strategies to achieve zero hunger by 2030. We’ll highlight the challenge of climate change, revel at the promise and possibilities of new technologies, and again remind ourselves of the urgency if we are to sustainably nourish a population of 9.7 billion by mid-century. But some very important actors will largely not be part of these conversations: the children and youth that will be shouldering these burdens and marshaling solutions in the decades to come, when many of us have stepped back. Of course, engaging youth in agriculture isn’t just something to plan for in the future, it’s something we need to do to meet today’s challenges. In sub-Saharan Africa where the population will double by 2050, there are already an estimated 12 million new jobs needed per year to absorb the new entrants to the job market. So what do we do to go beyond the rhetoric of inspiring and including youth to actually engaging them and employing them to create solutions?

Today we have a new resource to help us: I have the pleasure of announcing the launch of a much-awaited report from the Feed the Future Developing Local Extension Capacity (DLEC) project entitled: “Engaging Young Agripreneurs: Options to Include Youth in Private Sector Extension and Advisory Services in Rwanda and Uganda”. This study reviewed 37 initiatives engaging youth across extension and advisory services (EAS), both as providers and as recipients of these services. These included a range of models including agripreneurship training, internships, paraprofessional services, fee-based services and financial services. The report contains rich analysis and 10 key recommendations to achieve better outcomes when engaging youth. Some highlights include: appreciating the diversity of approaches to engagement and their unique contributions, encouraging a supportive policy enabling environment and recognizing and designing for the diversity of needs and experiences contained within the ‘youth’ category (often spanning 15-25+).  

While this report focuses on employment and opportunity, some argue we should begin even earlier when it comes to including youth. Yesterday, I moderated a panel, on the sidelines of the World Food Prize, focused on school-based agriculture education and panelists discussed plans to spark a movement to increase access to this engaging, exciting and unique approach to learning. The methodology discussed at this event, modeled after the Future Farmers of America, has been adapted and adopted in several locations throughout the world. It not only focuses on the ‘hard skills’ and science of agriculture, which is often brought back home to the farm, but also the ‘soft skills’, like leadership, preparing young people to succeed in the future, whatever they pursue. 

What is clear is that more holistic, coordinated and deliberate inclusion of youth is needed in the decision-making shaping our future food system. We need the energy, youthful proclivity to adopt technology and try new things, and so many other talents of young people to meet the rising challenges we’re all facing.

If you’d like to read more about youth in extension or explore the broader body of work of DLEC, check out the DLEC project page here and on Agrilinks.

Empowering FPOs to Sell Directly to Retail Customers to Improve Farmers’ Earnings

Posted on by Susan Thomas

While mobilization of farmer groups in India is a promising and accelerating trend, sales and marketing remain key challenges for these groups.

Supply-side Story

India has an estimated 300 million farmers and farm laborers who struggle to earn a living through the market channels available to them today. Farmers are increasingly coming together to form producer groups through which they can realize economies of scale, reduce input costs, strengthen their bargaining power, and access finance for working capital and purchasing catalytic infrastructure. There are ~6,000 active producer groups in India today and the government aims to mobilize a further 10,000 in coming years. While still nascent, ~30% of these groups are well organized and have reached maturity to take on primary value addition activities like aggregation, grading and sorting, arranging transport logistics and managing customer support. They are universally seeking innovative sales and marketing tools and services.

Demand on an upswing

At the same time, households want convenient access to healthy, safe products. There are 166 million middle and high-income households in India today and that is expected to double by 2030. Healthy and organic purchases of food consumed at home is estimated to drive USD 1.4 trillion in incremental spend for this growing cohort. These consumers want to know where and how their food is produced with growing concern about pesticide use. Such preferences are not limited to elite urban consumers anymore. Food and grocery retail in India is a USD 300 billion market today and less than 0.5% is online. COVID-19 has accelerated exposure to and interest in purchasing food products online and now is an opportune time for producer groups to directly cater to this growing demand.

Challenging Status-quo

Digital Green is piloting a digital platform, Loop, that Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) can use to easily publish a product catalog, receive orders, collect payments and communicate with their customers through chat and automated notifications. The FPOs are responsible for grading and sorting, packing and delivering products to their customers.

Loop digitizes sales transactions and generates a rich dataset of hyper-local prices and customer preferences, which are translated to market insights that enable farmers to increase their earnings. Unlike traditional traders and digital aggregators, Loop empowers farmers’ position in the market to communicate their distinctive stories and build direct relationships with consumers.

Loop collects a small transaction fee on sales transactions completed through the platform which funds development and maintenance of the platform.

Adding a Cutting Edge

WhatsApp is the most widely used communication platform in India and is increasingly being leveraged by small businesses for commerce. Loop leverages AI-enabled WhatsApp chatbots to help producer groups efficiently manage basic customer service queries and integrates voice-based features to drive business activities like tracking orders and updating product availability, which will increase the inclusivity of the platform, especially for non-literate farmers, especially women.

An additional innovation of Loop is the team buy model. Producer groups set a minimum purchase volume and a pre-set delivery date; consumers form virtual teams and pool their purchases to reach that minimum volume. Each team assigns a lead who receives physical delivery of the goods on behalf of the other team members and they arrange last-mile distribution among themselves.

Digital Green’s research on household consumption patterns and preferences suggests this model is differentiated and compelling for consumers. It delivers on a desire for value (bulk purchase = lower price), responds to consumer interest in knowing where their food is coming from and how it’s grown, while retaining the convenience of online ordering and home delivery, tapping into the inherently social nature of food shopping. Team-buy also makes direct to consumer sales and delivery economically viable for producers as it increases the average order size, introduces “virality” which reduces customer acquisition costs, reduces the number of delivery points, reduces wastage since producers have confirmed purchases rather than guessing demand which enables them to optimize farm operations around batch orders.

 

Loop is an initiative of Digital Green, a global development organization that empowers smallholder farmers to lift themselves out of poverty by harnessing the collective power of technology and grassroots-level partnerships. This present iteration of Loop builds on Digital Green’s experience operating a shared transport service which helped 23,000 farmers move 123,000 tons of produce worth about USD 17 million to local markets and realize price increase and cost savings. Loop is operational on a pilot basis in Andhra Pradesh, India today. Through Loop, we envision a just, resilient and human food system. Just – with increased earnings for farmers; Resilient – emphasizing local supply chains, sustainable practices and indigenous foods;
Human – where producers and consumers build personal connections.

Effective Monitoring & Evaluation of Health & Nutrition Program Performance

Posted on by Susan Thomas

Digital Green collects information related to program performance from the community level, to monitor the performance of its agriculture and livelihood programs, which is uploaded on its web-based monitoring system called Connect Online Connect Offline (COCO). Major indicators regarding the effectiveness of program implementation are publicly accessible with the help of a web-based analytics dashboard. However, learning from initial pilots of health and nutrition projects (since 2012) highlighted that although there is an increase in knowledge and adoption of behaviors these are not physically verifiable nor as tangible as they are in agriculture and livelihood programs.

Thus, when we started the implementation of project Samvad in 2015, we knew it would be difficult to collect and monitor the information through COCO. Hence, in order to regularly track the increase in knowledge, practices, and behavior change outcomes of Samvad we developed an innovative design of periodic lean surveys in partnership with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). LSHTM provided technical support to our Monitoring, Learning & Evaluation (MLE) team to execute the lean survey.

The lean survey monitors and evaluates the implementation of the Samvad project and seeks to understand and improve the outcomes and impact and are carried out in five states where the project is active, namely Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, and Uttarakhand.

In Bihar and Jharkhand where the program implementation started earlier and is in a more advanced stage of implementation, the surveys are carried out every quarter and in others, biannually.

Statistical Process Control

To monitor the outcomes and processes of the Samvad project, we used an innovative method of lean survey which uses Statistical Process Control (SPC) method. SPC ensures regular monitoring of improvement in the implementation system, processes, and outcomes, and has its basis in the theory of variation. This helps us understand common and special causes of occurrence of an incidence (outcome or process) and its consistency and variability longitudinally throughout the period of program implementation.

With SPC, the outcomes of the intervention can be depicted chronologically through graphical representation. These graphs, called ‘control charts’ show program outcomes with upper and lower control limits based on the variability. These charts have a central line depicting the average of an outcome and two dotted lines representing upper and lower control limits. The control limits usually depict plus/minus 3 standard deviations from the mean. The control charts indicate a change in outcome when it exceeds the control limits. With the help of these control charts, one can easily identify consistency or variation within an outcome throughout the implementation process.

Since this method clearly shows the changes that occur on a continuous basis, it is useful for the purpose of monitoring and course correction, where needed. Moreover, SPC harnesses the power of classical significance tests and it is equally useful to understand the impact of a program and its exposure among the targeted populations. Surveys conducted using SPC help inform the program strategies and course correct. Information on SPC in further detail may be accessed here.

 

The control charts above show that the proportion of women who have been exposed to Samavd intervention. It showed that:

  • The exposure of married women (aged 15-34 or women with a child under two years) to Samvad intervention has increased in all states except in Bihar from the initial round (Sep 2018 in Jharkhand and December 2018 in Odisha, Chhattisgarh, and Uttarakhand to December 2019).
  • In Bihar, the exposure level has been within the control limits except in round 3 and 5.
  • In Jharkhand, in the first round, the exposure was below the control lines and in round 2 to 6, it has been within the control limits.
  • In the other three states, the exposure level has exceeded the control limits indicating a definite increase in the exposure level.

One of the major reasons for different levels of exposure to Samvad intervention in different states is the way the implementation partners in different states disseminate the videos. In Bihar, the videos are disseminated by frontline workers of the livelihood mission to the members of self-help groups. These self-help groups include members of all age groups but women of the target age group are relatively lower in number. This may be one of the reasons that the percentage of women exposed to Samvad videos is relatively lower than those of the other states. In Odisha, the videos are disseminated by an NGO which has greater control over their video disseminators and this along with their rigorous capacity building may have resulted in a higher level of women’s exposure. In Uttarakhand, the video disseminations started late and thus the exposure of women to the Samvad intervention is low.

These surveys have helped us in tracking the Samvad intervention exposure, knowledge and behaviors of communities, and also the availability of supplies. Tracking of program performance over the period has helped timely course correction of the strategies for improved health and nutrition outcomes.

Tracking the availability of commodities

Through the lean survey, we also track the availability of maternal, child nutrition, and family planning commodities at the village level with health and nutrition functionaries. For example, in the 6th round of the survey, in December 2019, we found that iron and folic acid (IFA) tablets which are important for preventing anemia among pregnant women, were not available in 25% of the villages surveyed in Bihar, 19% in Jharkhand, 33% in Chhattisgarh, 3% in Odisha and Uttarakhand each. Such a gap in the supply hampers the demand and adoption of practices promoted by the program.

Conclusion

Lean surveys have the unique strength of serving the purpose of program surveillance to understand the current performance and also to assess the impact of any intervention. The statistical process control method used in these surveys brings the rigor of classical statistical methods with time-sensitivity to programmatic improvement and makes them more useful than the traditional survey methods. The lean survey method can be used for other similar programs where tracking of outcomes is not feasible through ongoing program reporting.

If you’d like to like to learn more about this check out this webinar recording.

Building a Healthy Online Community on WhatsApp with Farmers

Posted on by Susan Thomas

As countries across the world went into lockdown to break the chain of the Coronavirus pandemic, we found novel ways of keeping in touch, exchange information, spread awareness. One of the most interesting things I noticed in the initial days was the ‘virality’ of videos that explained how the COVID-19 virus spreads, as I received the same videos from multiple contacts on the various social media applications. Another feature was the increased use of the internet-based messaging application WhatsApp by local communities that shared hyper-local information that could be at such times indeed lifesaving!

Working with Digital Green I have seen the power of videos in translating complex information into clear and easily understood messages; interacting with the farming communities I have also understood the value of community networks.

At Digital Green, I have been working with various teams to think beyond our popular video-based extension approach which has helped farmers reduce input costs and improve their yield; but we want to do more, we want to help increase their incomes. For this reason, we’ve been watching closely how the rural farming communities have been adopting smartphones and going online in the last few years. The views and subscriptions of our YouTube channel started exploding just as we saw many farmers becoming YouTube sensations and influencers.

This had us fast-forwarding our own plans. Late last year we created a multidisciplinary task force that spent weeks carrying out desk research, holding ideation sessions at work, followed by farmer interactions on the field to find that one eureka moment. The apple didn’t drop. But we were besieged by a number of ideas. We decided to go ninja on each such spark, take quick small steps to tackle them all.

 

Early Insights

We found that our audience (in this pilot project rural Bengaluru, Dodaballapur) was most active on WhatsApp. And that while they were active on the platform it was confined to personal interactions, leisure, and entertainment; rarely for information or building new networks/connections. We also found that the village community was quite fragmented, they were unaware of fellow farmers in their own village and therefore unable to leverage useful information through this new medium of communication. Our experience over the last decade or more has taught us that agricultural practices, problems, and needs are quite hyperlocal in nature, which we find are best tackled by strengthening the community networks.

Thus, we decided to build a hyperlocal farmer’s community on WhatsApp giving them a space to share their farming stories, problems, queries, and successes which could be heard, appreciated, and addressed by experts as well as peers. And once the ground was fertile we wanted to layer it up with more value-added services for the community which could help them fulfill their latent aspirations, increase their income, and bring convenience to them.

We decided to take an iterative human-centered design approach. We started by creating a WhatsApp group by adding a few farmers we had built a rapport with and waited to see how the groups would grow and evolve organically. For the first few weeks, there was no moderation, we encouraged farmers to add other farmers to the group, to post content which they wished to share with their peers. We saw a lot of posts coming through ranging from politics to religion to family pictures (yes, a lot of good morning messages with photos of flowers too) to even some farming related posts. The group which started with 6 farmers had grown to more than 100 farmers in just a month and mostly all organically. The group was not silent for even a single day since it started which was very encouraging. While all of this gave us good learnings but it was not exactly what we were working towards – building a healthy online farming community where farmers exchanged information around agriculture and allied activities.

A group member even shared a collage of the kind of posts which were being exchanged in the group

A group member even shared a collage of the kind of posts which were being exchanged in the group

Our How-to List

That’s how we learned that to build an online community, we had to grow and nurture it. We chalked out and executed many small experiments to run on our group, such as video chat with an Ag-expert, polls, and competitions, etc. We set clear success indicators for each experiment which would guide us in making ‘go’ or ‘no-go’ decisions. Since the reaction to experiments run on WhatsApp were almost immediate we made it a point to synthesis our learnings as a team at the end of each day – this was really helpful in keeping us on track, we were conscious of each decision taken and ensured we would never go back to ‘reinventing the wheel’.

 

We deliberated on our messaging strategy and we even came up with 3 metrics that our content had to fulfill – it must be Relevant, Engaging, and Inspiring. Our posts now focused on:

  • Addressing problems faced by farmers by offering seasonal and timely advice on crops through experts. We held fortnightly conference calls between experts and farmers which was much appreciated by the community
  • Co-creating content with the group members. This was achieved through prompts such as polls posted from time-to-time.
  • Offering information such as daily market rates of major crops of the season that were posted on the group at the same time every day.
  • Farmers were encouraged to share inspiring pictures of their fields which elicited recognition from peers through comments and emojis. This was found to be motivating for the one who shared the pictures as well as for others to practice and share further.

    A collage of the kind of posts which were being exchanged now in the group
    A collage of the kind of posts which were being exchanged now in the group
  • Organizing offline farmer events – this helped set the tone of what farmers could expect online
  • Providing a platform to discover and encourage experts from within the community who could answer questions that arise from peers.

 

Social Listening is Key

This change in the quality of interactions was heartening for us as well as the farmers, who have come to take great pride in being associated with these groups. The members also take tremendous ownership in maintaining the quality of discussions. They value the time spent on this group and if someone toes the line by sending in irrelevant content – another member is quick to share the community guidelines that were developed over the course of the groups’ lifetime.

This experience of careful observation of how the community was engaging on the platform, synthesizing, and iterating helped us grow the groups into effective channels of communication for a network that was fruitful for all. It gave us great confidence to create and engage online communities which we are now applying in other use cases – both agriculture as well as health and nutrition interventions.

Our Journey: Staying farmer focused and learning from evidence

Posted on by Susan Thomas

Digital Green started its journey in 2006 as a project of Microsoft research, with a mission to empower smallholder farmers to lift themselves out of poverty by harnessing the collective power of technology and grassroots-level partnerships. We join forces with governments, private agencies, and rural communities to promote good practices in agriculture, nutrition, and health, using videos that are of the community, by the community, and for the community. 

We recently brought to a close two flagship investments supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) with: (1) A partnership with the National Rural Livelihoods Mission in India; and (2) the Ministry of Agriculture, the Regional Bureaus of Agriculture, and the Agricultural Transformation Agency in Ethiopia through which we have reached 2.3M farmers (70% women), created over 6000 videos and trained over 50,000 frontline extension workers.

With COVID-19 and continued risks posed by climate change, we are continuing to innovate.  As we look towards new innovations with the use of multiple digital channels of communication & solutions to support access to markets, we want to take stock of what we have learned in the past. 

We have learned that a farmer-focused approach is key to promote adoption of new practices. That is why we share locally produced videos on agronomic practices that feature farmers who are role models in their communities, building on social networks through facilitated group discussions to enable collective learning. 

Deep partnerships with governments contribute to systems change at scale. State and national governments have institutionalized the community video approach through committing financial and human resources and embedding the approach in extension strategies. The governments of India and Ethiopia have invested $21.6M in the approach, and 75% of districts we partner with in India have built capacity to independently sustain the approach.

And finally, farmer feedback and data enables constant iteration and high returns on investment. Feedback mechanisms must collect actionable data to enable realignment to individual and community needs. Digital Green’s ‘Connect online Connect Offline’ (COCO) platform tracks gender-disaggregated data and farmer feedback, which informs the next iteration of videos and helps curate content that results in increased impact. 

As a learning organization, we recognize that we have a long way to go – from ensuring that we continue to support our partners address the differences in quality across regions; that data is not just collected but used to make decisions; that content is truly targeted & tailored to the needs of farmers; and that farmers have the agency to choose the extension services they want by controlling and sharing their data on their own terms.  

Starting today, and over the next few weeks, we will share some of our main evidence & learnings in the form of short videos by prominent researchers who have evaluated our collective impact.

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Independent Digital Development Consultant, Martine Koopman, who supported USAID, DFID, BMGF and IFAD funded research by Landell Mills shares here findings on the use of integrated communication channels (video, radio, and IVR advisories) in disseminating agronomic practices in Ethiopia.

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Beyond agriculture, Digital Green has also tested its approach to support health and nutrition messaging among rural farming families. Suneetha Kadiyala, Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and the team will share preliminary findings from a 4-arm cluster RCT, in Odisha, India to test participatory videos to promote nutritionally sensitive agriculture (NSA) & use of participatory learning and action meetings.

 

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Katya Vasilaky, Assistant Professor at California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo talks about the impact of the community video approach when tested at scale in Bihar with the State livelihood mission called JEEViKA. This randomized controlled trial spanning two seasons studies one crop (rice) with a focus on the System of Rice Intensification and also studies different types of messages delivered to farmers.

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David Speilman, Senior Research Fellow at International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) shares the main outcomes from a study evaluating the impact of the community video approach in Ethiopia (on reach, knowledge, adoption, yield & cost-effectiveness). This study was done in the context of three crops (teff, wheat, maize) & practices already being promoted by the Ministry of Agriculture (e.g., row planting, precise seeding rate & urea dressing), and also varied with the gender of the recipient; This RCT was part of a larger research collaboration between IFPRI and Digital Green in Ethiopia, of which many outputs are discussed in this video.