March 22/23 meetings in Patna

Want to take advantage of various team members being in Patna so proposing a couple session:

• Internal working session and dinner on March 22

• Connect with JEEViKA morning of March 23 (there is a chance that JEEViKA our key stakeholders don’t join this meeting; lets plan as if they will be there but be prepared for them to not show)

• Still finalizing venue as of March 15, will finalize by March 16

Agenda for Working Session

March 22 venue: TBC (Paliputra? DG office?)

March 23 venue: Lemon Tree (TBC)

• Unknown is whether JEEViKA will attend; they have been invited for 1030am

• Should we invite BISA or members from Convergence Platform to explore potential collaborations?

Context on JEEViKA meeting

• We are interfacing with the Livelihoods team whose focus in farmer productivity and income. The objective of the livelihood initiative is to enhance sectoral size and productivity growth in key livelihood sectors for employment generation of the poor. This will be achieved by making investments in technical assistance, service provision and setting up of market support mechanisms

  • Manoj - State Program Manager (Head of the Livelihood vertical and key person for strategy and implementation of the livelihood interventions)

  • Anil - Program Manager (Second in command at the Livelihood vertical and leads the implementation of the livelihood interventions in the state in coordination with the district level teams)

• While JEEViKA has given us the greenlight to engage VRPs for data collection, Manoj (who is a key decision maker) is not super bought in to this project

  • Note, we can go higher up the CEO of JEEViKA who is a supporter but are trying to get Manoj and Anil bought in

• They feel the project is too research oriented and the farmer benefit is not obvious

  • On the research front, they are curious what we are doing re: GHG emissions

• They further feel that JEEViKA is already promoting many of these practices and its not clear what is additive about this project

• Proposed agenda / talking points for session with JEEViKA

  • Our focus on this project is yield scale emissions; the practices we are promoting (early sowing, optimize nitrogen application, ZT, DSR, etc) do increase productivity (and resilience) and income

  • We are taking steps to drive up adoption of these high impact practices

    • Do we have a sense for current adoption rate for these practices? Our anecdotal sense is that there is a still a lot of room for growth

    • More targeted advisories; expect that things which are more contextually relevant have a higher likelihood of adoption. Andrew McDonald (Unlicensed) and Sonam sherpz (Unlicensed), you mentioned some research in this area; this meeting would be a great opportunity to introduce this

    • Introduce practices that are not already covered by JEEViKA (eg, Potato ZT, micronutrients)

    • Better engage farmers and VRPs through tools like the scorecard which contextualizes farmer performance vs. peers

    • Looking ahead, farmers that are following more sustainable practices and can make verified claims along these lines can realize better market access and maybe even unlock new revenue sources through carbon markets. This is still pretty speculative but the work we are doing supports development of such markets

  • Provide a high level summary of the standards and model inter comparison

    • This will give JEEViKA a sense for what are we doing with the data that is being collected