Notes from Jan 25 meeting
DG: Akash Asthana (Unlicensed) Namita Singh (Unlicensed) Ashu Sikri (Unlicensed)
SEWA: Nithya and Salonie
A couple highlights relating this to recent DFN convos:
Cultivating strong local leadership is critical ingredient for success of the collective
Marketing support also critical and something that is a real challenge bc there is a lot of diversity in what is grown and challenges in moving beyond extremely local markets
Access to finance is important but didn't come across the biggest blocker; the type of capital that is required are funds for fund capex (eg, purchasing processing and other value addition equipment) not WC to smooth out the cash cycle
They seem keen to work together and have strong values alignment so would be great to have as a partner in co-creating DFN
Salonie and Nitya from Sewa Bharat which is the national level federation for SEWA and it aims to create a support system for cooperatives, bring in innovation, help women collectives setup producer companies.
For reference, Sewa has 150 member orgs and 1.9mn women members. Its a trade union for informal workers that has been around for 50 years. Many of the SEWA collectives are focused on agricultural production.
SEWA's vision of scale is a network of autonomous, smaller, locally sustainable enterprises not SEWA as some huge entity which I highlighted resonates strongly with our own orientation
Focus for the CIFAR project is how to support women's cooperatives; where are gaps and entryways where digital tech can play a supportive role in self-governance. Working closely with with two women's agricultural cooperatives
South gujarat, 1000 farmers (viable)
Ahmedabad, reviving a 200 farmer cooperative that is currently defunct
Work on establishing women's cooperatives in other geographies as well:
Partnership w Uttrakhand govt; supporting 40 cooperatives in one district, hundreds across the state. Trying to increase sense of ownership and enhance governance capacity, esp given challenges rooted in geography
In Bihar, work with 60k women across 5 districts. Primary trade is agriculture. Case study of Karnbhumi
Karnbhumi
Started as a project w Oxfam in 2014 to increase productivity in rice
In 2017, incorporated FPO w 750 shareholders in 2 districts
Initial focus on aggregating input purchases; this proved tricky bc there was a huge diversity in input requirements (given the geographical area was pretty large) so limited ability to aggregate demand.
Have been working with DeHaat which has helped w accessing seeds; plan to work with them on marketing as well
Marketing / Offtake is a challenge, wide variety of output across farmer members makes it tough to aggregate and deciding which markets to go and actually reaching them is a challenge
Women members need to make a big conceptual leap to go from manager own land to thinking at the level of an FPO.
Business knowledge is limited and women don't have context beyond their local markets
While the FPO shareholders are a mix of land owners and sharecroppers, board members all own some land and so not able to reach the the most disenfranchised
We covered a couple key questions:
What makes a women's agriculture focused collective successful?
Capacity building of local leadership is critical; usual focus is on increasing productivity but leadership / soft skills are really important
Geographic concentration helps; when localized, can focus on a single crop and have local participation in governance
Each leader is responsible for their local group and there is constant engagement between these members and local leaders
Establishing identity is really important and can be a step change from current state; do women see themselves as farmers and then entrepreneurs / collective members?
2. Where does it make sense to federate / centralize vs. decentralize?
One thing I was trying to get at with this question is where does it make sense for data to stay at the Producer group / local level and where does it make sense to aggregate and pool together?
Centralize:
Capacity building and training
Research
Compliance
Working capital / access to finance: bring in new assets or technologies (capital equipment like processing unit), cooperatives took a loan from federation and provided money to farmers who then purchased seeds
Some aspects of marketing, especially establishing linkages beyond local markets
HR and recruitment
Common tools (incl software) and templates: finance/compliance, order and purchase books
Some institutional level partnerships (eg, DeHaat)
Decentralize
Day to day management and governance
Input and output marketing
Demand aggregation and generation
Next Steps
DG to send a note proposing followup sessions so we can collectively figure out who to include from each side and perhaps even bring in leaders from the farmer groups (which I think will be great).
Ashu to draft email and get feedback from DG internal team before sending
Some threads that seemed intriguing:
How can we increase decision making capacity by collecting and presenting relevant and timely information? Can use this as a chance to showcase KDE (which seemed of interest) and farmer scorecard / benchmarking and better understand the workflows and painpoints within SEWA's agricultural producer groups
Video is powerful, how can it be used for capacity building of collective leaders and members? Again, DG can share some of its work in this space and I imagine there is a lot we can learn from SEWA.
Sounds like SEWA is putting together a peer network / learning group and we should participate in that
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Andrew Hicks (Unlicensed) scheduling an intro call with the team for Jan 17
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