Partnering with governments and community organizations in multiple countries, Digital Green uses its AI-powered platform to boost the cost-effectiveness of public extension systems.
How We Work
The Goal
Digital Green bolsters government-supported public extension systems in India, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nepal, and Nigeria by developing and providing them with an AI-powered assistant that delivers on-time, localized advisories. The platform’s users are extension agents, or EAs, college-educated government employees who are usually native to the regions they serve and have expertise in crops, livestock, and horticulture. Acting as educators and facilitators, the EAs work closely with local farmers to help improve their lives and productivity.
The Challenge
As skilled and dedicated as EAs are, they are often unable to optimize impact at the farm level because of the ineffectiveness of the systems on which they rely. Among the many tasks EAs are assigned are farm-level data-gathering, impact reporting and advisory distribution. But many are under-resourced and overworked. This results in low uptake of best practices, leading, in turn, to low farm productivity and income levels. One big reason these issues persist is the lack of digital tools at EAs’ disposal—for coordination, communication, data collection, and reporting. In situations where Digital Green is able to provide EAs with digital tools, we see, on average, a 20% increase in farmer income and 16% savings on ag inputs.
The Solution
The solution to the challenges EAs and small-scale farmers face is a Digital Green-developed, AI-powered assistant that helps EAs view upcoming tasks, log feedback and farmer queries, and retrieve advisory information to answer those queries. Digital Green, which has been providing EAs with pioneering tech tools since 2008, is currently building a chatbot app that integrates dynamic content (including video, scientific, meteorological, and financial) with deterministic-decision support models to make it searchable.
Leveraging recent advances in AI, our bot will be able to:
- answer queries on agricultural content
- enable the translation of scientific and technical content into timely, multi-format, localized advisories
- allow EAs to access training, keep up-to-date on evolving issues, and request specific support
Building on best practices in conversational UI, Digital Green is also creating an advisory delivery and feedback channel that supports two-way communications between EAs and our engine, bringing EAs’ knowledge to bear on Digital Green’s corpus of content and allowing our system to improve in real time.
The end goal of our work is to hand over parts of or all of the platform to the governments with which we partner, so that it can serve as a public utility.