Author: Susan Thomas

“Stories are the shortest distance between us and truth. So when we understand and uncover these stories, we gain the opportunity to understand that maybe we need a new story.” – Colette Baron Reid

Being a part of Digital Green’s Training team I’ve had the opportunity to travel to several states in India to train field level extension agents on video production and disseminating these videos on best practices related to agriculture and health and nutrition. I’ve found that trainings are extremely interesting settings to meet new people, and get to know the local cultures and lived realities of people. At Digital Green, our trainings typically span over three to five days, which is just about enough time to get to know and develop a bond with the people you are working with.

At such trainings that I have facilitated, I have met many young dynamic women of my age. In my informal interactions with some of them, during breaks and after trainings, I have gotten so many insights into their lives that have left me both inspired and also saddened at the absolute inequality we live with and have come to see as normal.

Under the Government of India’s flagship National Rural Livelihood Programme efforts have been made to organise women in each village into Self Help Groups (SHGs) of 10 to 12, to put it simply – with the aim of collecting regular contributions of small sums from each member to create a larger pool from which they could borrow when one of them needs a loan.

In the course of my travels across states like Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand where I have delivered trainings for Digital Green I have seen how these SHGs have been successful in creating a sense of belonging and community for these women. After marriage, women traditionally get relegated to household chores, tending to their children and families, and almost never have any social circle of their own. Their life typically revolves around their immediate family. Very often, their maternal homes are also not places they can turn to for support of any kind. It is in fact considered taboo for married women to interact with their maternal families, except for specific festivals, which can leave them feeling quite isolated.

In this light, these SHGs have come to signify much more than platforms where they can safely save and take loans from. Recently at a training in Bihar, I asked some of these young women if they had ever before been out their homes for a prolonged period, without another family member accompanying them. Except for one, for all others, it was their first time. One woman shared how they would have never had a chance to meet each other and become friends had it not been for the SHG group they are a part of, which in turn led them to participate in the video production training. At the end of the fifth day, I saw all of them exchanging phone numbers and promising to keep in touch.

At another training, in Jharkhand, I spoke to the woman who was serving food at the venue, and I got to know about the cafe that she had started at the Jharkhand State Livelihood Promotion Society block office. She shared that she had taken some loan from her SHG and started the cafe along with three other women from the group. She looked absolutely confident about the quality of her food, and in the way, she was going about her work.

All the efforts we put in to reach women seem worthwhile when you meet someone like her. This is a success story for me not only because of the success of her café but also because of the collaboration the women in the group were able to achieve with one another. Instances like these make me wonder if we will ever be able to capture such intimate heart-warming stories in our impact assessments.

Besides the actual saving and lending, when women meet in their SHG meetings, it’s wonderful to see them go through their routine of introductions, prayers, attendance, signing registers, filling forms and bearing the office of president, secretary and other such designations with such pride and sense of responsibility. To me, just the process of it feels empowering. Having your name called out as a member of an association, to have an identity outside of the traditional role of wife, mother or daughter-in-law – to many it might not seem worth mentioning, but sometimes, something as small as this can help in developing a stronger sense of identity.

Another recurring feature which strikes me every time I am in the company of a group of young women is being asked how I ended up doing what I do, how much did I study, where did I study? If I am married, how does my family ‘allow’ so much travel? I sense so much curiosity in them about my life. In the differences they see, they understand the many ways in which they have led a more marginalized life. A lot of times, we have new and lactating mothers attending the trainings, and it is absolutely amazing to see how they juggle between looking after their infants and participating in the training. I often think that they could have been working with me in my office, or be sitting in my drawing room, discussing all the issues plaguing us as a society, just like I do with my friends back in the city. It’s just an accident of birth that they struggle to manage their traditional roles and responsibilities of the household as well as contribute to the work in the farming and livestock management and I am traveling around the country meeting people, making my own decisions and earning an income.

I am very hopeful and positive about big leaps being made with regards to gender in the next few decades, which might be a long time in the span of an individuals’ life, but short given the enormity of the problem. SHGs allow women to share their problems, their stories resulting in a new awareness of sorts and a development of solidarity – they realize that they are not alone in what they are facing, and it lends so much strength to them to bring in change for themselves and their families. Once a woman sees her own oppression, it is difficult for her to un-see it, and this is the very first step in solving a problem – to be able to see it as a problem.

In my use of human-centered design (HCD) at Digital Green, I found that the inspiration and ideation phase in HCD as being completely intertwined. They can’t really be separated into two neatly divided phases. While we were trying to find a solution to the question ‘How can we enable field level workers to operate equipment confidently?’ – the processes we followed seemed to make no sense initially. In my previous blog, I had mentioned that it was the ‘messiness’ of the process that I really started enjoying, once I stopped being so hung up about ‘being systematic’. In that, what I both enjoyed and learnt the most was the freedom to follow your intuition and develop your own versions of methods, activities and processes.

While we used several of the conventional methods, such as interviews and secondary research, we also designed and conducted activities with users that we felt would get us closer to our design principles, and the solution. They could largely be bunched under 2 categories:

• Sharing what they know: We wanted our users, the field level workers, to learn the technical aspects of equipment operation really well. Therefore, it was important to understand the current experience and knowledge levels. What they shared revealed some very interesting insights. For example, that their ‘visual language’ was very different than ours. Or symbols on equipment, which we take for granted, is complex for them. They understood illustrations which show the context better than abstract symbols.

• Sharing their perspective: As trainers, we tend to see the learning process from our perspective and it is quite difficult to know the perspective of a person who learns differently from us. We saw this difference and wanted to understand from the field-level workers what is necessary for them to learn and how the learning process can be made easier. To reach there, we asked them to demonstrate how they would have made their peers learn, which revealed some critical aspects in their learning, for instance, the verbal language used in training – they used different terms to explain things than our trainers.

Under the above two categories, we conducted several activities, some of which used ‘co-creation’. I am using the term co-creation to define a process in which the end user creates at least some part of the prototype. It is a concept, not a tool or a method. Several methods can use the concept of co-creation. It could be a role-play that the users develop along with the designer, or a script for which they provide dialogues.

Participatory Video techniques and Co-creation

Of the different methods, I focus on participatory video here. Working with any participatory process, including video production, teaches you to learn from those who are at the center of the issue. Participatory video production is supposed to be driven by communities to communicate what they want to, and in a manner that they want. In co-creation models, though the user community is involved in the creation of a prototype/solution, they are usually not the ones driving it. Further, they communicate what the designer wants them to communicate. To make it more tangible, through participatory videos a community could have made a video about any issue they cared about. But as part of co-creation, we, the designers, asked them to make a video story specifically about equipment operation. The agenda was driven by us, not them.

Our team combined these two seemingly similar, but actually different concepts. We created several prototypes for different solutions that can together improve the training. The possible solutions included a training video, an illustrative handout and a team game that also works as a skill assessment. Initially, we thought that an obvious prototype of a video would be a role-play or a script. But then we thought – we have all the equipment and experience to make a video quickly. So, when prototyping, we used participatory video techniques for co-creation of a video. We asked the field level workers to develop the content for the video, which would show their peers how the equipment works. When they discussed the story with us, they had:

• Developed characters – who should be training whom (a senior field level worker will train a new joiner)
• Decided the context – when does one need the learning support (users usually find it difficult to operate equipment at the beginning),
• Defined the content – what are the essential operations to be learnt (a 15 step process)

We shot the prototype video with them, edited it the same evening and tested it the next day in a meeting of field level workers. Interestingly, most of the feedback that we got was related to the audio and light quality. Pretty much everything else worked. We made some basic changes, developed another version and tested that too, to come to a version – one both the users and us were happy with. We used the same process for two other training videos, where users even shot the video (though they did not edit it), and both times the results were the same. Very clearly, the users were the best creators, at least in this case.

We acted just as facilitators, and the users were creating the whole framework. It definitely helped that I knew participatory video techniques well, and it was easy for me to facilitate the process of story development and shooting.

The final training video that we shot was not participatory. Professional filmmakers, who were not related to the context at all took the script and shot the video with professional actors. This was done primarily to ensure ‘quality’ since that was the major drawback of the prototype video that we created. However, it was still ‘co-created’. After all, the script, though modified to some extent, was developed by the users.

The use of these different methods for research and prototyping gave us some strong design principles that kept us in good stead as we made several training videos over the course of 2 years. You can watch the training videos that we made on pico operation, documentation and video production here.

Do you know of designers who’ve used participatory techniques and/or processes in their design research? Have you used it yourself? I would definitely be interested to know more about your experiences in bringing together participatory videos and HCD together.

At the beginning itself, I have to admit that when I took a first glance at the human-centered design (HCD) approach, I couldn’t discern much difference between qualitative/participatory research methods and HCD research methods. I had mentioned in my earlier blog that at Digital Green, we decided to use the HCD approach to develop a more efficient training system. As we moved through the inspiration and ideation phase, I could see a lot of parallels between qualitative/participatory research and HCD, both in the approach and in the tools. However, there were some very specific differences too. What similarities did I find, and what were those differences?

Framing your Design challenge (or a Research Question)

at sorted, we set out to set ourselves a design challenge. Since creating a more effective and efficient training system was our main goal, we started developing our design challenge around it. The three main difficulties that we faced in framing our challenge were:

• How to frame a question that has appropriate scope? What is ‘nothing too wide and nothing too narrow’?
• How to ensure that our biases do not creep in into the question we frame?
• How do we know we have arrived at the right question?

These issues are very similar to those a qualitative researcher faces when developing her/his research question. One benefit of designing a challenge within an organization is that at the beginning itself you might have a very good sense of the impact that you want to have. Whereas an academic researcher is not looking at impact per se, but at the knowledge and learning that the research can help create. And, therefore, this process could be much more ambiguous for her. At the same time, working in an organizational context can limit you right at the beginning. I personally felt so caught in thoughts like, ‘But this is not how things happen at DG’, ‘But others will never be open to this’, ‘Oh, it is going to be so difficult to implement something like this.’ Before we could free ourselves to be ‘creative’ and ‘innovative’, we were binding ourselves. What helped us to get through the process was:

• Not trying to resolve all problems through one question
• Coming up with lots and lots of questions, narrowing them down, deciding unanimously the one which we definitely wanted to pursue to impact our community, and then refining it.
• While refining the question, keeping the impact that we wanted to create at the center, and not letting other organizational considerations affect us at this stage.
• For the following round of refinement, keeping an eye out for the real issues at the organization and field level and tweaking the question accordingly.

When deciding our challenge, we went from very broad and ambiguous questions, for instance, ‘how can we have an efficient training system?’, to very narrow and biased ones, for instance, ‘ how can video be used to train field level workers?’.  After a lot of iterations, the design challenge that we came up with, that worked for us, was ‘How might we ensure that field level workers can operate equipment confidently?’

Choosing the right methods – for generating data + creating innovative solutions

To find solutions, we started off with planning our research. It can be a tough call deciding which methods would be the most appropriate for you to find the answers and get closer to your solutions. The method that you use can determine the information and answers you get. There can be endless methods to use in HCD – you can stick to fairly traditional ones, such as interviews, to more creative ones, such as making collages, or you can even develop your own!

I felt that reaching the right methods is a comparatively well-laid down path in academic research. Once you know your research approach and the epistemology, it is easier to find suitable methods to generate data that can answer your research question. In HCD, while you know the end you want to reach, the multitude of methods and their appropriateness can be slightly tricky to navigate through. Because you do not want to simply generate data, but you want to be ‘creative’ to find an ‘innovative’ solution. There are multiple purposes that methods in HCD research must fulfill. I found that in HCD mapping the methods against three main purposes can be rather helpful. These purposes are:

1. Developing some basic knowledge about the challenge
2. Thinking more creatively about the actual challenges and solutions
3. Learning in-depth about the challenge from the people directly facing it 

We used interviews and observation extensively for our first purpose – ‘developing some basic knowledge’. Analogous inspiration helped us get some creative ideas and peer-to-peer activities helped us delve deeper into the issues that field level workers faced. For example, one of the methods that we used was to ask one field level worker to explain the functioning of the pico projector to others. The image here represents one such activity. This ‘mix-methods’ approach helped us open our minds to the various possibilities of what solutions can look like.

Prototyping solutions, iteration and messiness

We did a thematic data analysis right after our secondary research and interviews to get further direction, and developed‘sub-challenges’ or ‘insight statements’. We zeroed in on three main things that can be possible solutions for an effective training system: 1) contextual training videos; 2) game-based objective assessment; 3) illustrative handout.

So far so good. So far very much like academic research. But this is where things changed… and got messy. Collecting data, analyzing it, developing prototypes, testing prototypes, collecting more data, analyzing the new data, developing another prototype…. All of it went on in a very intuitive and non-linear manner. One day you conduct a peer-to-peer activity and the very next day you’ve done a quick analysis developed a prototype and are out in the field testing it. It was nothing like… a literature review of data collection to data analysis to writing… what I did in a step-by-step manner while doing academic research. And the messiness didn’t make someone like me, who does things very systematically, happy and comfortable!

The messiness of the process also created some friction in the team, because often things didn’t make a lot of sense and I, for one, questioned if it was leading anywhere. But the deeper we dug, answers started becoming clearer. The more iteration we did on prototypes, the closer we got to our solution. After all, like they say, there was some method to the madness. What I learnt was this:

1. Do not rely too much on assumptions based on your thematic analysis. Rely more on what the real life scenarios teach you.
2. Prototyping can feel difficult, but just make something! Even a really quick and bare prototype will give you insights
3. Every iteration should bring something new and answer your design challenge. When that stops happening, stop prototyping. 

The hidden academic researcher in me initially desisted the quick iterative and non-linear nature of HCD, but also realized that the value in it is you do not spend too much time creating a ‘beautiful’ solution, which doesn’t work all that well. Quick iterations help you get rid of bad ideas before you’ve put in too much effort, money and time, and (more dangerously) before you get quite convinced about your ideas yourself!

More than the ‘method’, the madness was what I started enjoying in our subsequent use of HCD. This included creating our own ‘methods’ and process variations. Since I have done participatory video, I used some techniques from it for developing prototypes. In my next blog, I would focus on using participatory video technique in HCD, what it meant for us to co-create and where it took us while creating our solutions. 

Travelling through western Maharashtra recently, I could not help but notice the contrast between the villages here and those in the eastern belt of Bihar and Jharkhand. A greater variety of crops, abundant fields, and progressive farming practices – the differences were many. I was told that my first impressions may not hold true for the entire state, but certainly do for the belt containing the villages of Adhegaon, Alegaon, and Chandaj (Adhegaon cluster). This region has a long history of vegetable cultivation. Moreover, various private companies selling seeds, fertilizer, fungicides, and the likes often conduct demos in this area – making farmers here pioneers in adopting new inputs. But is that all, I asked myself? Through field interactions, I learned that there was more to the success than obvious – collective action was an important facilitator. The farmers in these villages form a close-knit community with regular (and transparent) information sharing amongst each other. For farming, they have formed a WhatsApp group on which they exchange information on what crops to grow, what seeds to buy, what fertilizers to use, and how to harvest. In the dense maze of private companies and the government selling/promoting a variety of inputs, often this peer learning WhatsApp platform helps in reducing the information clutter. When it comes to selling, these farmers normally patronize with specific traders, sometimes aggregating produce with a small group of other farmers. Farming in this cluster is a profitable business but has the potential to increase farmer’s income even more – especially the smallholders.With funding from the British Asian Trust, Digital Green is leading the implementation of the LOOP project in Maharashtra, in partnership with Mann Deshi Foundation. Through this, participating farmers can:

• • aggregate produce more effectively by including a larger number of farmers, and therefore greater quantities of the crop for sale

 

• access newer markets that could potentially help them earn more with the same produce

During my time in the village, I saw farmers growing bananas, pomegranates, okra, watermelon and most magnificent of all – marigold. With the festive season right around the corner, marigolds were in full bloom, ready to flood the markets. At that time the price of the crop increases from INR 10 per kg to about INR 100 per kg, making it quite lucrative for farmers. The price, of course, depends on the market, and the key to realizing a good profit is information on the rates in different markets – and this is exactly what the LOOP app facilitates. I learned that before being part of the LOOP project, farmers normally went to the Pune flower market where they got a rate of about INR 45 – 50 per kg during peak season. This is almost half of their INR 80 per kilo earning from a four-day sale of flowers in Mumbai through LOOP. With an additional net profit of INR 350,000 from the sale, farmers were more than thrilled to be a part of the program. In fact, one among those farmers chose not sell his flowers with the others, and realized a price of INR 45 per kg only, losing out on the additional profit. From this experience, now these farmers are tapping markets for other crops they grow. Recently, they made a sale of inferior quality raw bananas in one of Mumbai’s chips making value chain, instead of the Panghat market where they usually went.

Despite this success, the experience in the Adhegaon cluster raises some critical questions. Are these simply some preliminary windfall gains – just a matter of chance? Or can farmers maintain a consistent increase in their income? If yes, who will ultimately bear the burden of the rise in prices? What if the aggregator or transport provider, in the long run, becomes another middleman in the market? Will grading improve the farmers’ chances to increase their incomes even further? What additional value-added services can help these smallholder farmers? Can we digitalize payments so as to reduce financial risks in large transactions? These are some important questions that Digital Green is working on. While the long-term success of the project is still to be proven in Maharashtra, the Adhegaon cluster is certainly showing a positive impact in the short term.

Last week my colleagues and I were at the Andhra Pradesh AgTech Summit 2017 organized by Government of Andhra Pradesh, Confederation of Indian Industries(CII), Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Dalberg. The AgTech Summit held on 15th, 16th, & 17th November, 2017 in Vishakhapatnam brought together various agriculture technology companies from across the world to share and deliberate on the theme of “Progressive Farmer, Smart Farming”, highlighting various technologies that are currently being used or have potential to be used in agriculture – ranging from the use of drone, hydroponics, data-driven analytics to various apps and extension technologies. The audience comprised of farmers, students, scientists, policy-makers, and thought-leaders.

Digital Green was invited as a partner to the Department of Agriculture, Government of Andhra Pradesh to display our unique video-enabled extension approach at the AgriTech exhibition. Although small compared to other agri-technology companies exhibiting, the size of our stall at the exhibition was no barrier for the throngs of farmers and students who were keen to learn more about our community-based extension approach.

The humble pico projector that enables extension agents we train to share best practices in agriculture with smallholder farmers in the field played a key role in drawing an impressive footfall to our stall at this global event.

Through 2 pico projectors, we played four community videos in Telugu language, on natural farming best practices. The videos acted as a magnet, especially for farmers. One farmer would stop to view the video and another farmer would follow suit. Gradually there was a small gathering of about 10-12 farmers watching the video and they would stay to ask about the actors in the video – farmers like themselves – and about the practice showcased.

Satyanarayana, a farmer as well as a milk aggregator, from Kottakota village in Vishakhapatnam district in Andhra Pradesh, where our intervention is yet to reach, was eager to use such videos to learn best practices and apply them himself as well as motivate the nearly hundred farmers that he interacts with on a day-to-day basis. Another farmer M.V. Subba Rao from East Godavari district has been looking for literature and relevant information on zero-budget natural farming and pointed out that Digital Green extension system will be helpful to farmers in his community. Gundra Ambayya, a smallholder farmer from V.Kothapalli village in East Godavari district requested that we transfer the videos on natural farming methods onto his mobile phone – which we did with pleasure. While watching a video on natural farming method for cultivating tomatoes, one farmer asked us “Why did they put a stick as a support for the tomato plant?” He wanted to watch more such videos on vegetable cultivation. Many Agriculture Sciences students were also fascinated by the videos and agreed that it’s a good way to reach many farmers.

This experience reiterated our faith in the farmer-to-farmer learning process and community-driven extension system. Our model of community-based videos supporting extension outreach is completely by the community, for the community. Since 2008, we have facilitated the production of more than 5,000 locally relevant videos in more than 50 languages. We have done this in collaboration with our grassroots partners and rural farmers themselves, allowing farmers to share knowledge with one another.

In those three days, my colleagues and I have explained the concepts of our video-enabled extension approach, many times over to the teeming farmers and delegates.

Farmers, students, and Summit delegates were keen to know when Digital Green services would reach their villages, whether we have an app to access these videos and if there are crop specific natural farming videos and whether they could watch these videos on their mobile phones. They wanted to know if we could share the phone number of the farmers featured in the videos and if we could train them on video production and dissemination. On reflecting I’m struck by the tremendous urgency in our farmers to learn about new methods and technologies to improve their practice. The farming community, in general, is vexed with current production systems in which input cost is higher than the value they realize from the output, leaving them disoriented with their occupation as a farmer – despite the hard work and dedication. Farmers are desperately looking for more sustainable production systems. This is where extension services become most crucial. The curiosity among farmers as seen in our interaction at the exhibition stall point to the fact that farmers are also demanding better extension services. On that note, We believe, strengthening extension systems is an essential first step in addressing the crisis in agriculture.

We are proud to share here that Digital Green has been working in Andhra Pradesh since before bifurcation of the state and since November 2015 we’ve been working in all 13 districts with the Department of Ag Govt. of AP.

Our partnership got a shot in the arm with the signing of a tripartite Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Rikin Gandhi, Executive Director, Digital Green and B.Rajashekar, IAS, Special Chief Secretary, Govt of AP and Hari Jawaharlal (IAS), CEO, Rythu Sadhikara Samstha & Commissioner – Dept of Agriculture, Govt of AP for the new BMGF supported Digital Innovations Project in the state. The project was launched formally on the 15th of November, 2017 in the presence of the Honourable Vice President Muppavarapu Venkaiah Naidu, Honourable Chief Minister, Nara Chandrababu Naidu & Minister for Agriculture (Govt. of AP), Somireddy Chandramohan Reddy.

 

 

(Additional inputs from Pritam Nanda, T.Surender & V.Kamalakar)