Earlier this month Awaaz.De facilitated a training hosted by Aga Khan Rural Support Programme on a new application: producer company information services. The training was held at AKRSP’s beautiful facility in Netrang, a rural area outside Ankeleshwar, Gujarat. Our goals was to train an initial group of farmers in their 4,000-farmer producer company on usage of an Awaaz.De-powered data collection tool.
The producer company’s main office struggles to know what’s going on in the field at any given time due to the remote, disconnected nature of its farmers. In particular, during harvest season the company needs to know how much of each crop under management farmers expect to pull from their fields in the next few days in order to plan procurement and fulfill orders. Currently the process is mainly done through individual phone calls and field visits. This largely manual, paper-based process is inefficient, error-prone, and expensive. Moreover, it can sometimes result in lost sales; if the main office gets an order for 10 tons of mango for delivery in two days, lack of real-time stock information telling how much mango they have on hand and expect to collect in the next two days prevents them from securing the business. So it’s not just a matter of awareness, but of bottom-line profitability.
With Awaaz.De, AKRSP has deployed a voice-based data collection tool for the Netrang producer company. Twice a week, farmers will call into an automated survey and enter expected harvests for any of seven crops for the next four days, all through touchtone. The data is collected by Awaaz.De and automatically aggregated into a report that AKRSP can access in real-time.
In Netrang we trained about 60 farmers in the producer company on data entry. They were first explained the concept and goals of the system, then walked through how to access and enter data through the phone survey. In a short amount of time, all including many who had no experience with automated systems, were using the system beautifully.
During discussion at the training in in the field, farmers raised two interesting points. One, that they would like to know, at time of data entry, what the negotiated price of the crop they are entering for would be. This transparency is necessary for a healthily functioning community-based organization, and something that the producer company would have to respond to. Second, a common sentiment after the training was, “This is a great service for the main office. Now you have real-time harvest information, and that makes your job easier. Wonderful. But what about us? We need relevant, timely agricultural advice to make our job easier. Can the phone system support this?”
Great question! And motivating to see that the demand for interactive services was voiced without even asking. Fortunately Awaaz.De has been developing tools to support question and answer services and information broadcasting for years. AKRSP recognized that following this first intervention, a second phase would need to follow right behind with services that serve the information needs of the farmers.
In this way a very potent toolkit is emerging for producer companies across India. And for that matter agricultural cooperatives, MFIs, rural banks, and other CBOs that struggle with the same fundamental challenges in working with rural communities: collecting real-time information in, and providing localized, on-demand information out. We are seeing that in the short run, Awaaz.De can help organizations be more efficient in their data collection processes, which ultimately saves them time and money. And in the long run, we can provide an access and communications channel to build capacity through appropriate knowledge sharing tools.
We are very excited about the potential to serve CBOs through tools for better information flows throughout their ecosystem.
Below is a video by Chirag nicely summarizing the training:
