Tag: women farmers

Women Who Grow: How women farmers in Odisha, India are at the forefront of the digital agriculture revolution

Posted on by michael

In the heart of verdant Odisha, India a quiet shift is underway. Thousands of women farmers under the Swayam Sampurna Farmer Producer Organisation (FPO) are transforming agriculture – embracing digital tools to secure their livelihoods, boost climate-smart crop production and make data-driven decisions.

Swayam Sampurna, which roughly translates to “complete self-reliance”, is an FPO created by women farmers, for women farmers – consisting of over 4000 members spread across 139 villages in Odisha, India. The organisation is headed by an all-women Board of Directors, and is staffed by Community Resource Persons (CRPs) who are women farmers well versed in the unique needs of each community they serve. 

These smallholder farmers often face delays in receiving timely and tailored guidance on farming practices, seeds and inputs. Many farmers rely on traditional advisories and must depend on infrequent visits from government horticulture agents or travel long distances to agriculture departments. Delayed access to advisories can lead to many missed opportunities to improve yields for major local crops like millet, watermelon and tomato.

Digital Green Trust has introduced digital interventions across all points of the agricultural value chain, empowering the women of Swayam Sampurna to make data-driven decisions for their farms and families.

Video Advisories Promote Climate-Smart Agricultural Practices

The use of chemical fertilizers is prevalent in India, but heavy use has serious health and environmental effects including reduced soil fertility and contamination of water sources. 

Digital Green’s video advisories, made by digitally-equipped women farmers, and shared by trained women CRPs,  promote the use and preparation of climate-smart, organic fertilizers to improve crop health. “By watching videos, I’ve started preparing organic manure to reduce input costs and improve the health of my watermelon crop,” says a farmer.

E-Farm Collects Data to Boost Demand 

The E-farm application empowers CRPs to generate demand digitally instead of manual, paper-based collection from each farm. Farmers can capture product demand directly from their fields, collecting data efficiently.

With this intervention, CRPs free up valuable time otherwise spent manually recording data from each farmer. Kabita Taria, a CRP from the Baunsnali Gram Panchayat explains: “Previously, we had to travel to collect indents from farmers. Now, with e-Farm, everything is updated instantly on the app!”

By leveraging e-Farm’s digitally aggregated demand data, Swayam Sampurna can enhance their bargaining power and use their insights to negotiate better prices for their crops.

Farmer.Chat Provides Real-Time, Customized Advisory

CRPs use Farmer.Chat to provide accurate and timely answers to questions from the farming collective. Farmers often seek real-time advice on managing pest attacks and treating crop diseases. A farmer explains, “The platform offers tailored advice for the crops I grow, making it more relevant and easy to follow. I can find useful recommendations anytime, helping me make timely decisions for better results on my farm.”

With Farmer.Chat, Swayam Sampurna’s farmers no longer have to rely on bi-monthly visits from horticulture experts – often too late to tackle urgent pest and disease issues. “Now we can get all the information very easily, without depending on the nearest medicine shop,” says Singha Tudu, a farmer from Jashipur who had been struggling to address crop diseases effectively.

Empowering Women through Capacity Building

Through Digital Green’s tailored training program, CRPs are equipped with the skills to use digital tools like Farmer.Chat and e-Farm. This allows them to facilitate informed decision-making at every stage of farming—from crop management to market negotiations.

As women farmers themselves, CRPs understand the specific challenges faced by their communities. Their ability to use digital tools to guide other women farmers has created a peer-sharing ecosystem – where each CRP not only improves her own farming practices, but also enables the same for other women in her community.

The Ripple Effect of Digital Empowerment in Agricultural Communities

The ripple effect of digital empowerment is profound: with digital tools at their fingertips, women no longer need to rely on external resources and can make climate-smart, data-informed decisions for their farms and families. This not only lowers their household burden but also increases the collective bargaining power of women-led FPOs, ensuring market access for their produce, and higher income flowing into their communities.

As digital-first CRPs and FPOs continue to spread accurate, real-time and customized agricultural knowledge, these interventions have the power to transform the way entire communities approach agriculture, empowering women farmers – in Odisha, and beyond – to pave the way for the future of agriculture.

Tech Solutions for Smallholder Farmers in Bangladesh’s Jessore district

Posted on by Susan Thomas

While Bangladesh has witnessed some recent success in improving food security in Bangladesh, such as tripling its rice production, some challenges remain. A key challenge is that of connecting smallholder farmers to markets so that they can realise the best prices possible for their produce.

There are of course many factors that contribute to an uncoordinated market system which makes it unprofitable for smallholder farmers. Poor road networks, high transportation costs, a proliferation of actors, lack of capital and collective bargaining power to negotiate prices make it difficult for smallholder farmers to venture into markets outside of their community in hope of better prices for their produce. These challenges also discourage youth to enter farming as it’s not viewed as a profitable occupation.

So we wondered if we can break this status quo and tweak the market system in such a way that it is fair for smallholder farmers?

For the last two years, Feed the Future Developing Local Extension Capacity (DLEC) project implemented by Digital Green, the International Food Policy Research Institute, the Global Forum for Rural Advisory Services and Care International has been trying to find a solution to this challenge by piloting Digital Green’s access-to-market model in Bangladesh. In this model, a market entrepreneur is selected in each village in consultation with the community. Usually, a young farmer, this entrepreneur (aggregator) provides ‘door-to-door’ service of transporting the fresh produce from farm to market for a nominal fee.

When farmers in the community want to take their produce to the market they call the aggregator, who comes and picks-up the produce, sells it at the market on their behalf and gives the money back to the farmers the same day.

Farmers save time and cost of transportation – especially if they are vegetable growers and need to go to the market approximately every four days. By optimising transport based on the volume of produce, the aggregator too is able to control cost and gets better market prices with stronger negotiation power for bulk selling.

The model leverages digital technology to ensure transparency, efficiency and trust between the aggregator and farmer. When the aggregator collects the produce from farms, they use digital weighing machines to measure the quantity collected by each farmer. They also use separate sacks for each farmer to ensure those farmers with higher quality produce get better prices. After selling the produce, they log each transaction in the mobile app which generates an SMS receipt for each farmer. The farmer can also call the buyer and verify the price in the receipt. A mobile helpline for farmers that is channelled to a Digital Green field staff also assists with troubleshooting.

The traditional market system in Bangladesh is not gender inclusive. However, with trusted relationships with the aggregators, women heads of household were also able to get reliable access to markets and better prices for their produce and this encouraged more women farmers to cultivate home-stead gardening.

From April 2017, through this service, we have transported approx. 2.6 million kg of vegetables and ensured $1 million in payments. We have about 2,300 active farmers using the service and each farmer saves 3-5 hours of their time each week and we have seen an indication of 12-15% income increase through this service. These numbers are driven by the highly motivated, young entrepreneurs who take pride in the hard work of vegetable aggregation and transportation from dawn till dusk.

Due to the trust and respect aggregators built within their communities, DLEC was able to link them with Care Krishi Utsho, an enterprise of Care Bangladesh, to provide quality organic inputs to farmers. This partnership resulted in the aggregators gaining access to an added income source as mobile sales-agents of Krishi Utsho selling quality inputs to smallholder farmers. The aggregators also become a focal point for public sector extension agents, linking them up with smallholder farmers to provide demand-driven, timely and relevant advisory.

The success of DLEC’s market access engagement catalyzed additional interest and funding from The Government of the Netherlands to expand the program to additional geography within Bangladesh as part of the Profitable Opportunities for Food Security project implemented by ICCO Cooperation. SNV Netherlands Development Organization leveraged the DLEC aggregators to share weather advisory, plant & growth tips and pest outbreak alerts via their Fosholi app. And the School of Oriental & African Studies at the University of London is investing resources to study how to integrate nutrition, gender and climate resilience into the aggregator-led market access model.