Category: Vision

Farming the Future: Covid19 and beyond

Posted on by Susan Thomas

“I often ask myself what will happen if I stopped working? When the floods came, I had to be in my field to drain the waters. When the pandemic came, I had to be there to take care of my crop and fend for my family. Droughts, floods or pandemics, we don’t quit. We cannot quit. If I quit, we have to forsake our income and there won’t be food at home. My neighbors won’t be able to work on my farm and they will lose their income. We will lose the vegetables that we grow that can feed many families. Whatever may happen to the world, we farmers can’t and don’t quit even for a day.”

These are words from Koyu, a 67-year-old farmer from my own village in Kerala who grows paddy and vegetables in his 4 acres of land. I was speaking to him over the phone. There was both anger and anguish in his words.

“You know,” he continued, “everyone takes us for granted. When everything shut down… transport, railways, postal services, banks, markets and offices including those of the government, we were the only ones working. Without any complaint or expectation. We continued to produce, we toiled. When we produce less, we earn less. When we produce more, even then we earn less.” Koyu did not mince his words while sharing his frustration.

Refer to the full report for further details.

When I had this conversation with Koyu a few weeks ago, at Digital Green we were speaking to hundreds of farmers in various states of India where we work in. As an organization working with and for small-scale farmers, it was important for us to understand how they are coping with the pandemic and associated uncertainties. We designed the survey in a way that would help us and our partners to understand specific issues faced by the farmers so that we can help them overcome the situation and recover faster. The survey report is available here.

Nearly one-third of the small-scale farmers we interviewed were afraid of contracting the Coronavirus. There is widespread fear and anxiety, among both men and women, on their ability to continue production and find a market for their produce. Farmers have indeed become more vulnerable due to the pandemic. However, nearly all of them said they will grow crops for the Kharif season. Farmers are not letting the calamity deter their intent or morale.

For a society that is reeling under multiple waves of a never-seen-before humanitarian crisis that has crippled our lives, society and economy, the path to recovery can be hard and arduous. Our farmers are already playing a crucial role in that path to recovery. They are ensuring productivity, generating employment, feeding our people and most importantly regenerating the rural economy. For the country as a whole, from policymakers to practitioners, from the civil society to the common people, helping farmers at this hour means helping the economy to recover faster and build back better.

While there are many concerns the survey brought to light and require immediate attention, the survey findings also point towards some important future considerations. Of these, there are three that I want to highlight, so that future pandemics, calamities, shocks and stressors do not derail our decades of development investment.

#Power2choose: Reimagining farmers’ advisories

Let us not treat farmers are mere recipients of aid and subsidies who are supposed to till and toil for society. Time has come to accord them the importance they deserve as active partners and participants in the development process. Let us empathize with farmers and bank upon their immense wisdom, patience and resilience. To help achieve that, farmers need timely and efficient access to information to produce better, market better and claim reasonable realization for their efforts. Digital technology is that opportunity to empower farmers with choices to make informed decisions. Digital tools can help them access specific information that they want – what, when and how. Let them decide. Let them choose.

#markets4farmers: Reimagining markets

Today, the investment our government has made towards Digital India is slowly bearing fruits. More villages are getting connected to networks. Mobile telephony has reached every nook and corner of the country. Our data costs are among the lowest in the world. Smartphone usage is rising rapidly. Smartphones, data and digital tools can combine to bring about a radical transformation to markets. Digital connectivity can create hyperlocal market loops, connecting local producers and local consumers. Popular applications like WhatsApp and Telegram can help farmers build digital storefronts and transact with local consumers. Let digital technology build a network of farmers and farmer’s groups across the cast expanse of India. Let technology adapt to the needs of farmers than asking farmers to adapt to the technology. Let millions of interconnected farm enterprises bloom.

#FarmerFirst: Reimagining data

We have been taking our farmers for granted. They have historically lacked access to technology and information and in the modern data-driven agri-ecosystem, they don’t even understand that their own data is one of their biggest assets. Many kept mining their data while farmers also freely shared their data with many. Privacy, trust, confidentiality and security has a very different meaning in their social context and relations. The time has come for us to make them aware of the value of their data and help them make informed decisions. While global and national efforts to integrate and share data across platforms are a welcome move and in the right direction, let the first and most important guiding principle be to put farmers at the center or at the apex of such initiatives. Efforts to streamline and make data efficient will not bear desired results if it is not primarily helping farmers to improve their lives and livelihoods.  Help farmers discover the primacy of their own data. Let Farmers be First.

A Transformative Grant to Empower the Voices of Women Farmers

Posted on by Susan Thomas

Digital Green is delighted to share that we received a $15 million unrestricted grant from MacKenzie Scott. It goes without saying, but this is an extremely generous gift that will be exceptionally transformational for Digital Green and the small-scale growers, especially women, that we serve. We are also humbled to be among this group of 286 organizations working on “empowering voices the world needs to hear.”

Since 2008, Digital Green has improved the lives of more than 2.3 million farmers, more than 75% women, in rural communities across South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, with digital solutions to enhance climate smart agriculture and nutrition practices. In partnership with local government and other grassroots-level organizations, Digital Green builds the agency of women farmers, in particular, through access to markets and protecting their data interests. With this gift, Digital Green will continue innovating and learning, allowing us to test new ideas and scale our collaborations to reach more farmers globally, as well as strengthen our internal systems.

“This gift is an exciting recognition of our work and mission to empower smallholder farmers to lift themselves out of poverty by harnessing the power of technology and grassroots-level partnerships. It gives us an opportunity to amplify the voices of small-scale farmers around the world,” said Rikin Gandhi, Digital Green’s Executive Director.

Kentaro Toyama, chair of Digital Green’s board, W.K. Kellogg Professor of Community Information at the University of Michigan School of Information and a fellow of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT, said, “We recognize that not all deserving organizations were similarly awarded and that we will do what we can to make the best use of these funds. In the process, we will also help other philanthropists recognize the value of Ms. Scott’s model of giving.”

To learn more about Ms. Scott’s motivation for investing in Digital Green and many other impressive organizations, please see this announcement: https://mackenzie-scott.medium.com/seeding-by-ceding-ea6de642bf.

Advancing Conservation, Agriculture and Livelihoods in Oromia

Posted on by admindigitalgreen

Despite their significance for biodiversity conservation, local livelihoods and the national economy, southwest Ethiopia’s forest and wild coffee areas face threats from deforestation, forest degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change. Among those forest areas that face such danger is the Belete-Gera Forest, which covers 150,000 hectares, which is part of Ethiopia’s highland rainforest and a high priority protected forest area. Belete-Gera forest represents two adjacent forest blocks in two woredas in Jimma zone and stretches over 44 kebeles (lowest government administrative units). The Belete-Gera forest lost 40% of its cover between 1985 and 2010. Population growth in and around the Belete-Gera forest; market forces, particularly for export commodities such as coffee; lack of land use policy and planning; and lack of land tenure security, have put pressure on forest resources. Trees are being cut to increase the amount of arable land for cash crop production. Fuelwood is the sole source of energy for cooking, heating and lighting. Large numbers of cattle are grazing in the forest, trampling undergrowth and eating vegetation.

Digital Green, with the financial support from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and in collaboration with Environment and Coffee Forest Forum (ECFF), is implementing the Advancing Conservation, Agriculture and Livelihoods in Oromia project. The project will reach 42,000 smallholder farmers, women and youth with the goal of reducing deforestation, forest degradation and biodiversity loss, while improving livelihoods of the forest-dependent smallholder farmers in the two target woredas of the Belete Gera forest landscape.

Digital Green and ECFF will work closely with institutions responsible for agricultural extension as well as forest development, protection and regulation, including the Woreda Agriculture and Natural Resource Management offices, Farmers Union Associations, Woreda Forest and Wildlife Enterprise offices, and the Woreda Women’s Affairs offices.

The project will employ Digital Green’s community video approach to foster adoption of practices that sustainably improve land and water productivity and reduce pressure on forest resources while improving livelihoods. Using a participatory forest management approach, the project will also build the capacity of government institutions and community members to protect forests and restore degraded land in their communities. The project will promote the sustainable harvest and sale of non-timber forest products, particularly honey, spices and coffee. The project will facilitate the formation of 40 women’s self-help groups to address women’s disproportionately low levels of access to extension services, and cultural factors that limit women’s participation in traditional farmer’s groups in the Jimma zone.

The Advancing Conservation, Agriculture and Livelihoods in Oromia project builds from the lessons of a previous project also implemented with the generous support from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. The predecessor project, Integrating Natural Resource Management into Agricultural Extension Services in Ethiopia, worked in 15 woredas in the Oromia and Tigray Regions in Ethiopia to increase smallholder farmers’ adoptions of natural resource management practices. A total of 44,206 farmer households were reached, exceeding our target by 17%.

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.

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.

Reaching Farmers in Times of COVID-19

Posted on by Susan Thomas

COVID-19 is creating challenges for our day-to-day project implementation plans, in particular, how we work with farmers. Digital Green established task forces in its India and Ethiopia country offices to explore how we can adapt our approaches and leverage technologies to communicate vital information amidst social distancing and lockdowns and to support smallholder farmers in coping with the economic impacts of COVID-19.

The task forces shared the following innovations they are implementing to support farmers under the unprecedented challenges of this pandemic.

 

Surveys to understand farmer needs

Digital Green is collaborating with its government partners in India to gather ground-level data via phone and WhatsApp surveys. The goal is to survey 800 farmers (200 each in AP, Bihar, Jharkhand, and Odisha) and provide government agencies with information to help them to proactively respond and prevent agricultural shocks and food security issues. Key questions in the survey include the challenges around the completion of the Rabi crop harvest, crops and acreage planned for Kharif crops, and inputs needed for the Kharif season.

Similarly, in Ethiopia, Digital Green conducted rapid phone and interactive voice response (IVR) surveys to gather data on agriculture and health/nutrition-related needs. In collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture Extension Directorate and Agricultural Transformation Agency, the collected data will be used by government partners to target extension advisories, as well as inform policies and decisions to modify agricultural programs.

Results from the survey in Ethiopia, which reached 200 farmers in four regions, identified the following challenges: (1) While farmers are aware of COVID-19, there is a need to reinforce messaging about preventive measures such as social distancing. (2) Limited transport services, market closures, and travel restrictions are disturbing market access. (3) Farmers are concerned about their ability to access quality inputs and receive services from unions/cooperatives. (4) Farmers expect planting delays due to lack of inputs and a shortage of labor. (5) Locust swarms are destroying harvests and imperiling the upcoming planting season. (6) Farmers are concerned about limited opportunities to work together, support each other, share experiences, and learn from videos.

 

Integrating digital channels of content delivery

The survey in Ethiopia conducted by Digital Green revealed that 88% of respondents listen to agriculture programs on the radio and identified it as the most accessible information channel, followed by phone audio messages (51%) and text messages (37%). Only 9% of respondents have both a smartphone and access to the internet and use mobile apps. Based on these findings, Digital Green is prioritizing radio, IVR and SMS as communication channels that do not require in-person presence for sharing information. Potential content delivery includes information about traders/buyers via IVR on a regular schedule, digitally linking farmers with potential buyers in collaboration with local government, providing digital extension information (agronomic and livestock handling practices), and early warning information regarding weather, disease and pest outbreaks.

 

Supporting market linkages

In India, Digital Green launched a directory to help buyers discover local smallholder farmers with available produce. This responds to concerns from farmers near Bangalore, whose crops were going to waste on the farm given that the traditional markets (mandis) were disrupted by the lockdown. This directory helps create market linkages, prevent crop loss, support food security, and ensure farmers are still able to sell their crops.

Also in India, Digital Green is evaluating ideas for new products and services that build on our existing solutions and helps smallholder farmers increase income and realize operational excellence in a commercially viable, scalable manner. We are exploring themes like marketplaces, traceability of produce, and agronomic advisory services.

 

Direct support to partners

As noted above, the surveys are not only providing valuable information on farmers’ needs and how to best address those, but the results are shared with government partners in order to support their efforts to address the impacts of COVID-19 on agriculture.

Our government partners are requesting support to ramp up their digital responses for example (1) provision of remote/virtual training on new technologies and practices; (2) co-funding for radio, poster production, microphones and fuel and other means to broadcast public health messages in villages, as well as personal protective equipment for extension staff and laborers; and (3) financial support to cover content production and broadcast costs to reach farmers with agricultural messaging using regional radio.

 

How are you and your organization supporting and reaching farmers during this pandemic? If you see opportunities to collaborate with Digital Green, please reach out to us too! Share your ideas and feedback at covid19@digitalgreen.org 

Our COVID-19 Response

Posted on by Susan Thomas

Digital Green remains committed to serving smallholder farming communities through technology and grassroots

development organization working with farmers during COVID19
Click here for our Capabilities Statement

partnerships while adapting our approach in response to COVID-19.

Farmers face growing threats to their health and agricultural productivity while taking care of themselves and feeding the world.

We are building on the social networks with farmers that enable them to share knowledge with one another and to connect with markets in a digitally connected world that can continue to function in the current crisis. 

Much like we always have, we start with individual farmers – to leverage their insights and needs and work towards building solutions in partnership with government, non-profits, companies, and most importantly, farmers themselves.

Beyond the immediate crisis, we continue to strengthen our collective resolve to enable farmers to lift themselves out of poverty.

 

We welcome your ideas and suggestions at covid19@digitalgreen.org and go through the links below for more COVID-19 resources and to learn how Digital Green’s staff, partners and beneficiaries are responding to the unique challenges they are confronted with.

Stay safe! 

 

 

How we’re reaching farmers in the times of COVID-19

 

 

A message from Rikin Gandhi, our Co-Founder

 

 

How DG is responding as an organization

 

 

Read here what our partners and experts in agriculture Extension & Advisory Services say about how EAS systems can and have been adapted for emergencies response and what more we should do now and in future.

 

 

Here’s a list of resources addressing various agricultural challenges emerging due to COVID-19 and some responses

 

 

Some of our staff on how they’re coping with the lockdown

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Video-based Mobile Courseware for Agriculture Extension Workers

Posted on by Susan Thomas

Agriculture extension workers engaged by the Government of India to share agricultural best practices among smallholder farmers play a critical role in building the capacity of farmers. To boost their reach and effectiveness, Digital Green trains them on using the community-based, video-enabled extension approach, which involves localized video creation, facilitated screenings and data tracking. To scale this approach in a cost-effective manner as well as with quality and further institutionalize it within the government’s extension structure, we created a mobile courseware, with inbuilt evaluation and accreditation. The video-based curriculum on video production and dissemination as well as agriculture and nutrition topics. The android application has in-built quizzes that test the frontline workers’ knowledge before and after they have completed watching the videos in a course. The scores are recorded and keep track of the individual frontline workers’ proficiency. A certificate issued after completing a course (on gaining a minimum of 70% marks) incentivizes the frontline workers.

With a grant from Oracle, Digital Green is currently expanding access to its mobile courseware on improved agricultural practices. This grant is supporting the development of the mobile curricula to train 800 extension workers who will further train 80,000 farmers on practices that increase agricultural productivity. This work is being carried out in Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh and Odisha. 

Jharkhand

Frontline workers in Jharkhand watching videos on their smartphones and learning how to use the platform.

In Jharkhand, our team had rolled out courses in 22 blocks spread across 12 districts of Jharkhand in 2018 among 330 frontline workers (FLWs) (known as Aajeevika Krishak Mitras-AKMs/Community Resource Persons-CRPs in Jharkhand). These courses were on potato and pigeon pea cultivation. Based on a comparison of FLW knowledge levels before and after the course, and anecdotal feedback from the field, we found this training app to be user-friendly and effective.

Based on the previous years’ experience, in 2019, our team rolled out 14 new courses on potato and pigeon pea cultivation, non-pesticidal management (NPM) and agri-nutrition practices across the same geography. In this cycle, the team has integrated knowledge assessment within the mobile app replacing the pen and paper-based tests used in the previous year. This would enable the team to effectively assess knowledge transfer to FLWs through this intervention. The mobile courseware is built on a Community Training platform developed by Microsoft Research and our team worked with Microsoft Research to improve the application’s architecture so that the courses can be accessed through different Android phones and videos can be streamed even in limited connectivity zones.

Odisha

We reached out to farmers across Keonjhar district in Odisha to understand the demand for self-service videos. Increase in smartphone penetration, fibre connectivity, ease of understanding through a video over conventional means and need for timely advisories were factors in favour of the experiment. 

Lalita Mohanta of Village Bhalughara, Odisha, a farmer, watching short videos shared on the WhatsApp group at her home.

Based on the need and enthusiasm amongst the farmers for such a solution, the team is designing small video clips on paddy cultivation practices such as blast (fungal infestation) management, harvesting and drying. Each video focuses on one micro practice and is available on Digital Green’s YouTube channel. Our team collected the phone numbers of farmers who own a smartphone and added them on WhatsApp groups managed by the block-level officer of the Department of Agriculture. Links to the YouTube video clips are shared on the WhatsApp group at the precise time a farmer would need to adopt a particular practice.

There are nearly 900 farmers across 10 Gram Panchayats under the block level officer and our team is tracking viewership of the video clips on YouTube to assess the demand for self-service content by farmers owning smartphones. They are also organizing focused group discussions with the farmers to see if knowledge is being shared across the peers and any of these being translated into the uptake of practices.

OUR FIRST MILLION!

Posted on by Susan Thomas

Digital Green is proud to share that we since we began our work in 2009, we have engaged over a million people across Asia and Africa.

 

Heres a note from our founder and CEO, Rikin Gandhi to all staff, partners, donors, friends, and followers:

 

Dear Friends,

 

I’m thrilled to announce that we crossed engaging more than 1 MILLION PEOPLE at the end of February 2016. That is an impressive achievement by any stretch of the imagination. There is a saying that “a journey of thousand miles begins with a single step” and we have already traversed more than a million of them.

 

It is easy to set targets in proposals and work plans but its another to actually achieve something as significant as this. This is of course just the beginning, but at least for a moment, take the time to consider what we have all accomplished!

 

One million people reached by our team of less than 100 people! For each person, a frontline worker had to knock on their door, encourage them to come for a video screening, a data entry operator had to register their details in COCO, and each community member had to take time out for the video screening and consider the possibility of changing their behavior.

 

 

All throughout, our team had to forge partnerships, coordinate programs, build technology, procure equipment, check quality, conduct trainings, assess impact, setup offices, develop budgets, submit reports, and more!

 

Everyone — in every location, unit, and role — deserves a hearty congratulation for achieving this amazing feat, and our donors and partners who have kept their faith in us and supported us in our vision and mission.

 

If you haven’t done so recently, check out Analytics today!

 

 

 

 

 

And of course, behind each number is a heart, a mind, and soul. Each of these individuals we have engaged had the chance of seeing an informational video from their own community (potentially featuring themselves!), and have the potential for a better life ahead of them.

 

It is hard to wrap your mind around how big of a group one million people really is. To give you a sense, here’s an illustration of one million people, in which, each dot represents one person (right click to save and then zoom in) 🙂

 

 

Onward,

 

Rikin