SEWA (CIFAR project)

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 

1. South gujarat, 1000 farmers (viable)

2. 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: 

1. 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

@Andrew Hicks (Unlicensed) scheduling an intro call with the team for Jan 17

"A data infrastructure platform will enable women agricultural workers to use machine learning algorithms to tap into rich data insights, such as tracking supply and demand for produce, predicting production costs, comparing market models and predicting competitive pricing."

https://cifar.ca/ai/ai-society/cifar-solution-networks/data-communities-for-inclusion/

Over the next three years, CIFAR’s first Solution Network will develop an open-access data infrastructure platform that will help women agricultural workers in India gain fair access to a competitive marketplace.

The international, interdisciplinary Network with members from India, Canada, Finland, Switzerland, and the U.K, will work with grassroots organizations to identify and remove technological barriers faced by women workers, including known barriers such as digital literacy and access to mobile phones. A data infrastructure platform will enable women agricultural workers to use machine learning algorithms to tap into rich data insights, such as tracking supply and demand for produce, predicting production costs, comparing market models and predicting competitive pricing. These insights will promote equitable economic opportunities for women agricultural workers in India.

Intro call on January 19:

DG: @alesha (Unlicensed) @Ashu Sikri (Unlicensed) @Andrew Hicks (Unlicensed)

CIFAR:

• Introductions

• Why did we want to connect? What are we interested in?

  • Linked by Dan Lussier from EMILI in Manitoba, digital ag initiatives and overlap with what CIFAR is doing

  • We also work with FPOs in India, saw some overlap with the data platform you’re working toward, and thought we should talk

• Give quick overview of FDN concept, data wallet, consent manager, and / or FarmStack, as applicable

• Our potential questions:

  • We want to learn more about the platform you’re building – what are the inputs, farmer data, historical data, only from the co-op SEWA or bringing in other data sources?

    • How are they thinking about data sovereignty wrt the farmer input data into the platform?

    • Would they be interested in any of our open-source tools to support it?

  • Are they developing AI / ML algos on their own, will those be open source?

  • Are they developing their own digital literacy curriculum or approach, or applying something from a partner?

  • Geography – are they looking to expand beyond this initial group?