IFPRI - CSISA - Information and Communications Technology for Crop, Weather and Market advisory services- digital green

Digital Green uses simple technology and social organization to amplify the

effectiveness of global development efforts to improve human wellbeing

22

Agricultural Extension

Training & Visit: Face-to-face interactions of extension officers and farmers

500,000 extension officers in developing countries

Extension agent-to-farmer ratio:

1:2,600 in South Asia

1:1,800 in Sub-Saharan Africa

High recurring costs, weak accountability, under-resourced, limited training

Extension officer “commuting” between farms

Dissemination of expert agricultural information to farmers

3

0 5 10 15 20

Others

Government demonstration

Buyer

Cooperative

Extension worker

Newspaper

Television

Radio

Salesmen (e.g., fertilizer, pesticide)

Other progressive farmers

% farm households (n = 51,770)

Main source of information about new technology and farm practices over the past 365 days (India: NSSO 2005)

Information Sources for Farmers in India

4

Video provides…– Resource-savings: human, cost, time

– Accessibility for non-literate farmers

– Minimizes knowledge loss

Digital Video for Extension

5

7 times more adoptions over Training & Visit model

15 months: 13 villages, 3 nights a week, 1,000 regulars

Digital Green: Early Results

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

Ap

r-0

7

May

-07

Jun

-07

Jul-

07

Au

g-0

7

Sep

-07

Oct

-07

No

v-0

7

De

c-0

7

Jan

-08

Feb

-08

Mar

-08

Ap

r-0

8

May

-08

Jun

-08

Cu

mu

lati

ve

Ad

op

tio

n R

ate

(%)

Classic GREEN

Digital Green

System Cost (USD)/Village/Year

Adoption (%) /Village/Year

Cost/Adoption (USD)

Training & Visit $840 11% $38.18

Digital Green $630 85% $3.70

At least 10 times more effective

per dollar spent than a Training & Visiting

system

Digital Green approach

• Mobilize farmers• Identify local needs• Technical inputs from experts

• Develop local content and story boards approved by subject experts

• Train local community on video production

• Videos feature local practicing farmers

• Mediated dissemination by local extension agent

• Data capture• Feedback from farmers

Farmer FeedbackAdoptionsAdoption verifications

Technical knowledge and expertise: IRRI, CIMMYT, Local Universities, Pvt sector and experts

Use of ICT to amplify impact

Build on existing interventions and efforts and layer technology solutions, thus amplifying the effectiveness and efficiency

- Diverse partners – Government, Private sector, Research institutions, NGOs

- Across different sectors and value chains- In India as well as overseas – Africa, Afghanistan, Colombia- 1 m families in India and over 300,000 in other countries

Capacity strengthening

Effectively transfer skills and strengthen capacities of partners and community

- Created a cadre of over 3000 community extension workers on use of ICT

- The community resource persons have produced over 2800 practice videos in 22 different languages and diverse domains (agriculture, livestock, poultry, enterprise development, health, nutrition, agro-forestry

- Community extension workers have conducted over 240,000 screenings resulting in over 400,000 adoptions

- Virtual Training Institute

Video Collection

Integrate tailored technology solutions

Great things are simple……DG Partner, Andhra Pradesh

• Reality TV show, “Hara Hero,” in development with NDTV

• Vodafone audio message reinforcement of screened videos

• Doordarshan potential distribution of content on government broadcast channel

• YouTube channel (2,600 videos, 20 languages, 1 million views)

• Video/audio library accessible over mobile value added service

• Farm Radio International collaboration to align/reuse content, cross-promote radio/video

• Pico projectors increasingly available in-country

Integrated communications channels

• Timeline-based activities of each individual farmer

• Integrated with Google Maps for grading operations and layering other data sources

• Data/feedback to aggregate demand and target public and private sector products and services

• Ranking of farmers and extension agents on non-monetary-based incentive ladder

• Network analysis to identify and predict influencers that drive adoptions in a community

• Farmerbook, Wonder Village linked with Facebook for farmer-farmer, farmer-consumer sharing

Farmerbook

• Building video-based courseware a la Khan Academy

• Structured practice categorization (sector, topic, subject)

Videos library and Analytics dashboards

• Physical observation of non-negotiable components of adopted practices

• HTML5 and Java-based mobile apps for online/offline data management

Data management framework

Empowerment, Connections

Audio, Video, Mobile

Backend Platform

Institutional, Targeting

Technology

Analytics

analytics.digitalgreen.org

Farmerbook

farmerbook.digitalgreen.org

WHERE WE WORK

DG Offices DG Academic Collaborations

DG Partners

Government collaboration: National Rural Livelihoods Mission, MORD, GOI- Currently in six states and

expected outreach of about 1 m farmers by 2015

- National Support Organization to NRLM

- NGO partners implementing value chain based interventions –lac, cotton, paddy, soybean, livestock and others

Private sector collaborations- Syngenta Foundation, Vodafone,

IFC-JK Paper, BREL, Mahindra Samridhi

Reach over 1 million farmers over 10000 villages

NGO and research institutions: like PRADAN, BAIF, CSISA, ICRISAT

Digital Green in Africa: Reaching over 300,000 families

- Ministry of Agriculture, Ethiopia- IDE, OXFAM America- SASACAVA Africa- Alliance for Green Revolution in

Africa- World Cocoa Foundation- Fayda Market

Sector and value chains:- Health and nutrition - Low cost irrigation devices- Agriculture- Cocoa- Quality Protein Maize

Thoughts ?

Leverage existing networks of community Service Providers

to effectively disseminate and help farmers adopt the

technology and practices at scale

Agri-extension as a business model or embedded

services?

Farmer feedback for further iterations on inputs and

technology?

Collaborations to enable risk reduction at the farmer levels?

Integrate various feasible ICT solutions at CSP levels ?

Thank you

E-mail: [email protected]; +91 9953325457