Compiling talking points / references / charts we can use for a concept note / one-pager
Feb 2022 DFN Intro for CoDevelop Fund for reference
Farmer groups enable small scale farmers to harness the power of aggregation to realize better prices and terms for inputs, more competitive sale prices and improve access to finance.
Despite their promise, most farmer groups are fledging enterprises with limited institutional capabilities and often struggle to engage and retain members.
While digitization offers tremendous potential in agriculture, it has not yet been fully harnessed due to lack of technology access and paucity of data. Collecting basic farmer information (land boundaries, crops grown, key agronomic practices) is a major pain point for governments and agtech innovators. Individual service providers invest in creating their own unique – and separate – systems for information capture. They are not incentivized to share this expensive information and, as a result, data is siloed and difficult to access and exchange.
Digital Green is working towards a future where farmer groups play a critical role in empowering small scale farmers to leverage their data to increase their income and build agency. We are developing:
Technology infrastructure for secure, consent based data sharing (eg, Farmstack and Consent Manager)
Intuitive apps and SDKs for farmers to capture data and share data (eg, Data Wallet)
Training and capacity building content on digital literacy with an emphasis gender inclusivity
We believe showing farmer groups a tangible and compelling benefit from digitization will put a flywheel in motion that creates the momentum for farmer groups to continue on their digitization journey.
Digital Green will provide grants to farmer groups so they can make investments which enable them to deliver value to their members and ultimately thrive. We are especially keen to support investment in physical assets and production practices which build farmer climate resilience as dedicated capital for such investments is urgently needed and sorely lacking.
We view these grants as catalytic investments which will put farmer groups on a path to realizing their promise for delivering value to farmers and motivate farmer driven data capture and sharing. unlocking this intrinsic motivation is critical for sustained engagement and data capture by farmers.
Small scale producers face significant challenges on the front-lines of climate change.
...