Description of Session
This session describes an agriculture extension program that transformed business management processes of 434 smallholder cooperatives growing rice, maize and millet crops in Senegal through the use of smartphone applications. For the Naatal Mbay program, RTI and Dimagi built CommAgri, an application that replaced the paper based data collection systems used by farmer networks. The application is based on CommCare, a platform typically used for health programs. It was chosen based on its demonstrated scale in other sectors, feature choices, ease of configurability, open source code and SaaS enterprise product approach. CommAgri facilitates the management of 75,000 detailed farmer profiles, their seasonal activities, crop monitoring, and harvest and yield assessments. Additional modules support credit tracking and inventory management. It also includes an Area Mapper tool to capture the area of farms, reducing the need to purchase a separate GPS device. CommAgri automatically provides crop production and financial health of each network through dashboards viewed regularly by Database Managers hired by the cooperatives, thus creating increased transparency and crop traceability and thereby allowing them to professionalize systems and capture markets beyond local subsistence. Dimagi and RTI are testing sustainable business model approaches to ensure CommAgri and its services can be sustainable through innovative cost recovery mechanisms. This involves partnerships with private sector partners selling agriculture insurance and offering loans and credit to farmers. The CommAgri platform offers these partners the opportunity to connect to large volumes of detailed farmer profiles and crop information, to sell tailored digitally enabled financial services. These new services are opportunities for cost-recovery and the answer to a long term sustainable business model for CommAgri.
