Roadmap to support FY23 planning

Owned by Ashu Sikri (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Mar 09, 2022
4 min read

March 1 disclaimer: This is a very rough draft, please hold off on reviewing and commenting at this stage. Hope to have something shareable by March 7

Context:

  • Evolution from project to product driven

  • Process:

    • 1) What do we want to see happen in DFN and FS over the next year (eg, roadmap or at least key activities) by country

    • 2) What are activities planned in our existing projects that related to DFN?

    • 3) Incremental things we want to accomplish for DFN and FS not covered by project activities inform the unrestricted budget

  • OVERALL unrestricted bucket for both DFN and FarmStack across all countries is at $577K. This is an estimate of the ceiling given that we're allocating a total of $2.5M unrestricted across everything

  • Will be helpful to see how much committed project work doesn’t seem to align with DFN or FS

  1. What do we want to see happen in DFN over the next year?

 

India (and cross-cutting)

Ethiopia

Kenya

 

India (and cross-cutting)

Ethiopia

Kenya

H1 (Apr to Sep) 

  • Increase awareness of DFN (why, what, how does what I am doing relate to DFN) across organization

  • Establish operating model among country specific DFN teams that fosters cross-pollination, provides leverage through shared services and empowers local teams

  • Pilot upto [3] entry points / use cases (a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic) with [5] farmer groups and generate signals to understand which has real product market fit

  • At least [1] data consumer leverages data from DFN in order to provide a value-add service back to a farmer

  • Grow team:

    • 4 product/tech: DFN India product lead, project management, user research, UI designer

    • 3 FPO onboarding and data collection resources (TBD, may be able to fill through program team)

  • Publish v1.0 technical product roadmap  

  • Publish [4] public blog posts on key learnings

  • Identify operational partners

  • Pitch DFN concept to Walmart (May 24) and BMGF (May/June) to support further scale-up; as part of this develop a hypothesis on eventual sustainability

  • v1.0 (not for public consumption but for collecting feedback) whitepaper on DFN / web3 intersection (role of tokens, benefits of decentralization, etc.)

  • Socialize DFN with key ecosystem partners like NABARD, SFAC  

  • Identify and storyboard topics for capacity building content related to DFN

Digitize SHGs

  • Grow team

    • 2 product/tech: DFN Ethiopia product lead who can cover user research and defining requirements, UI design

    • 1 on-boarding and data collection

  • DFN marketing collateral v1.0

  • Identify operational partners

 

  • Do something with cooperatives in premium / formal value chains (eg. coffee, dairy, tea)

 

  • Grow team

    • 1 product/tech: Shared between DFN and FS

  • DFN marketing collateral v1.0

  • Identify operational partners

H2 (Oct to Mar) 

  • Scale most compelling entry point to [12] producer groups. Alternatively, continue to pilot entry points looking for PFM

  • At least [3] data consumers leverage data from DFN in order to provide a value-add service back to a farmer

  • Pitch DFN concept to [3] funders to support further scale-up; as part of this develop a hypothesis on eventual sustainability

  • DFN marketing collateral v2.0

  • Publish v2.0 technical product roadmap

  • 5 further hires

    • 2 product/tech

    • 3 DFN on-boarding resources

  • Formalize agreement / relationships with [2] key operational partners

  • Host an event (virtual or gasp, in person!) showcasing the concept to collaborators / funders / enablers

  • Produce capacity building video content related to more generic benefits of data 

 

 

 

Notes / Open Items

  • Use case execution may be tied to cropping seasons; it may make sense to think about the next year as three phases: prep (now through May); kharif (June to Nov); Rabi (Dec to Mar). For now, just breaking the year into first and second half for simplicity; lots of unknowns for the back-half of the year 

  • Does “Digital Literacy” training live in DFN?

  • Do we embed a resource with the producer groups we are collaborating to play the role of a data officer (similar to the Kalgudi field officer) Is this something an existing DG program resource can manage or do we need to hire? 

  • Some of these tasks have dependencies on other teams (eg, comms, recruiting) and will call those out as we flesh out further

2. What’s already covered in existing projects?

India

Ethiopia

Kenya

India

Ethiopia

Kenya

  • P2P benchmarking/scorecard and data wallet covered in FRAME

  • FPO “omnichannel” marketing covered in E-Mircha (chili growers on Kalgudi and GS1)

  • Integrate FS consent manager into KDE and then share with someone (RySS extension staff, DG staff / ?) who will deliver targeted videos to farmers as part of TARA. @Vineet Singh

  • Capacity building videos as part of Tara (Being a shareholder in an FPO, Identifying Potential Businesses)

  • Engaged a marketing consultant to help FPOs in Odisha and Jharkhand sell to local traders in Atlas

The current work in Jimma is under the Packard Foundation project, and the plan to expand those SHG mobilization efforts (inc. working capital distributions) are budgeted under a budget revision approved under the BMGF-FCDO DAAS

 

N/A

 

3. What is the unrestricted ask for DFN

Gelsey Bennett (Unlicensed)
March 4, 2022

I just created slides for this. I think Ashu covered the India project mapping towards DFN quite well here.