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:

  • 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 individual and aggregated data, receive notifications

  • Some messaging tool for frequent engagement; probably a Whatsapp group to start and some IVR reinforcement as needed. DG provides a playbook to someone at FPO who manages the group, we will just observe interactions.

• 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]

    • Generate cumulative [5] lakh in sales from nursery by March 2023

    • Farmer benefit is access to quality saplings and increase in income from vegetable sales

    • ~40% of shareholders have smartphones and ~90% have phones

    • All women shareholders and BOD

  • Shravanbelogole (Karnataka):

    • Increase shareholders from ~600 to [800]

    • 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)

    • ~[90]% have smartphones.

    • Mixed gender, majority male.

• We will identify 1-2 additional FPOs who want 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

  • We do plan still plan to support the Jattu + Velugu collection center / processing area as we have made this commitment; we think they will be a good candidate for the tool described above

• As we ramp up, want to build a cohort of FPOs that supports our learning. Some considerations:

  • DG presence / ease of access to FO

  • Commodity: Want to cover a range of commodities incl something in dairy or livestock, high value / export commodity as well

  • Alignment with gender and climate themes

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

  • Increase in # of shareholders: Are farmers aware of FPO and is it delivering value which motivates them to come on board as shareholders? FPO needs to be creating value for members and can tech play some role in driving engagement?

  • Increase in Trading Volume and 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?

  • Farmer impact will be assessed by MEL team through surveys

Immediate Next Steps

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

Roles and Responsibilities

• Ravi: Overall coordination of program activities. Some specific things that program team will do:

  • Inform product design by sharing user pain points

  • Document user feedback on designs / wireframes and share with product team

  • Identify resource institutions and FPOs with whom we can share the product and get feedback

  • Data officer JD and recruiting

  • Risk identification and mitigation actions

  • Deliver product training sessions and share feedback back to product team

  • Continue to research high impact (climate resilience, gender empowerment) collective assets around which we can develop training SOP / playbook (need consultant support)

  • Aggregate state and central schemes + eligibility criteria (need consultant support)

• Gautam and Sai with Rubesh for design: Translate vision to a real product. Some specific things:

  • User personas, wireframes

  • Research and integration of gamification to incentivize data completion (reward points, etc.)

  • User Onboarding plan - Design

  • Gathering and analyzing the feedback received from the ground team for the onboarding journey

  • Gathering and analyzing the feedback received from the ground team in design (screens any additions etc)

  • Follow-up plans

  • Feature requests and prioritisation

  • Develop product training material (videos, etc.), localization for various languages, etc

  • Alignment w efforts in KEN and ETH (Ashu)

• ___, Eng lead

  • Build the product

Open items

• Finalize plan for India visit during week of Sep 26

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