BLR Planning Meeting Next Steps

Decisions

• We want to focus on improving engagement between FPO leadership (esp BOD members) and shareholders. Practically, this means we need to develop two interfaces:

  • A “dashboard” for BOD members which presents aggregated data and provides a repository of critical docs and info. More detail here

  • An interface / app that can be used by farmer members or PG officers to capture farmer level info and view aggregated data

  • Some messaging tool for more frequent engagement; probably a Whatsapp group and maybe some IVR reinforcement as needed

• These interfaces will be used initially by two FPOs and will enable them to realize specific objectives by March 2023:

  • Saharapada (Odisha): Increase shareholder from ~550 to ~[750] and generate cumulative [5] lakh in sales from nursery. Farmer benefit is access to quality saplings and increase in income from vegetable sales.

  • Shravanbelogole (Karnataka): Increase shareholders from ~600 to [800] and source [25] truckloads of tender coconut from members per month (vs. 12 truckloads today, mostly not from shareholders). Farmer benefit is ~15% increase in earnings (FPO pays ~2 rupee premium vs. average 13 rupee sale price from local traders)

• We will identify 1-2 additional FPOs who could leverage a similar solution over the next few months. Key selection criteria are mostly unchanged vs what we established earlier, a couple additional considerations:

  • FPO maturity: already active, some member engagement happening, desire for more engagement and for what purpose identified, quality of leadership and supporting resource institution

  • Operational overhead: Time to value, execution complexity (of what FPO wants to do), current DG presence / travel time

• In addition to qualitative feedback from FPO BOD and shareholders, focus on a few critical FPO level KPIs

  • # of shareholders: Are farmers aware of FPO and is it delivering value which motivates them to come on board as shareholders?

  • Total Revenue

    • It is critical to understand member engagement; % of revenue that comes from selling products sourced from shareholders or input sales to shareholders (vs other farmers) is a good signal for this and we need to figure out how to track this efficiently.

  • Service providers engaged: Is FO leadership leveraging data to engage with third parties?

Immediate Next Steps

More detailed and longer duration plan to support this work under development

Roles and Responsibilities

Open items

• Finalize plan for India visit during week of Sep 26