ICT for development - Digital Green

1 | ICT For Development

A Project Report on Digital Green: ICT

in Agriculture

By:

Anshuman Kamila (4011/20)

Ashutosh Singh (4018/20)


DIGITAL GREEN- ICT in Agriculture

Digital Green –INTRODUCTION

Digital Green (DG) was established to design, build and deploy information and communication

technology (ICT) for agriculture which would boost the effectiveness of extension services and

social changes. It is an independent non-governmental organization (NGO) which majorly

targets on training farmers for creating short videos which records their problems, enact and

share possible solutions and takes forward the success stories to other farmers.

Digital Green was initially a project of Microsoft research India’s Technology for Emerging

markets but later in 2008, it became an independent NGO.

DG, along with its partners, drives this entire project primarily as a technology enabled means

of cost effective means of communication, and an even effective way to bring about a change in

the society by involving local farmers to reach out to other farmers. It also pulls in different

researchers and agro based communities to share and spread relevant information about

better farming through their videos. DG and its partners are trying to accelerate the model

scale up across small farming communities in South Asia and Africa. They are committed to

maintaining quality in terms of

The effectiveness of the production and dissemination of relevant local contents

The impact which such videos will create, which includes the scope of a modern

sustainable agricultural growth and improves the socio economic stature and

also the self-efficacy of the agro based communities.


The Problem… There are over 6000 villages in India. These village communities are primarily involved in

farming. In fact, 60 % of India’s 1.1 billion populations are farmers i.e. double the population of

entire United States. The farmers tend to be marginal and small farmers, with about 1-3 acres

of land, and they make an average income of 1-2 $ per day.

Farmers face many issues such as droughts and rising costs of fertilizers and pesticides. Crop

yields have diminished after years of intensive farming, and farmers are often unable to get fair

price of their yield. While other sectors of the county has a prospect to grow, farmers struggle

to keep up .Many resort to selling off their lands and migrating to cities, few even commit

suicide.

Farming is a traditional profession and the bulk of what farmers do is passed on through

generations. They did what they already knew, this has changed considerably. Farmers

increasingly rely on hearsay of neighbors and the information of external agencies like the

government, fertilizer and pesticide companies and NGOs. Government extension workers

often visit farmers and provide personalized advice to farmers about their crops. This approach

has problem of a scale as a very large number of staff is required for individual farmers. One

approach that government has taken is to have farmer related broadcasts in TV and radio

programs. These suffer from multiple problems; the programs are too general and often

produced by experts who usually come from a very different socio economic background. The

farmers are unable to relate to the content and often end up tuning out.

Why DG?

DG is developing an end to end system to address this problem. They tape agricultural

demonstration of experts and farmers, using a camcorder and we use shared TVs to show the

content in a village. Videos are 8 minutes in length and are often repeated on demand of the

audience. They have experimented

with various approaches to use this

medium for agricultural extension.

What works best is when the

videos shown are mediated by a

human being, and these videos

normal occur in the evening in

makeshifts public places like

temples and streets. Farmers are


Often interested in knowing the names of the village and the farmers where these practices are

being adopted. To encourage the motivation of peers, DG takes the early adopters of the

village. They started using the interest of the farmers to be recorded on the video as an

incentive to start attracting more people to start using the technique. They are developing a

social network of search with these videos which have layers of local stars encouraging in each

other to be better farmers.

DG has demonstrated early success in popularization of sustainable farming practices in its field

deployment. Number of farmers who are adopting progressing technique is increasing

manifold. This approach is very cost realistic. It bootstraps on the existing social networks of

farmers and uses the power of technology to face the agricultural challenges of rural India. It

will change the paradigm of agricultural extension by enabling farmer participation and

encouraging the learning, adoption and innovation of better agricultural practices. Like the

internet, DG aims to allow anyone, even a farmer to be a content consumer and producer.

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18

Other progressive farmers

Salesmen (fertilizer, pesticided)

Radio

Television

Newspaper

Extension workers

Cooperative

Buyer

Government demonstration

Others

% farm households (n=51,770)

Ref: Indian NSSO: 2005


Process Flow

Initiation

The conceptual and operational aspects are decided and shared and an initial layout of the

problem is formed

Production

The locally relevant videos are produced using a proper storyboard and is checked for

correctness and quality

Diffusion

The videos are circulated regularly in the community to affect behavioral change.


Digital Green Operating Process Top Down

Mobilization

•Building the foundations of a lasting relationship between the community and the partner.

•Mobilization starts with a joint strategy-planning meeting between representatives of the DigitalGreen team and the partner.

Situational Analysis

•The purpose of a situational analysis is to assess how and where the Digital Green system can beextended based on selection surveys and a randomization process. Steps include-

•Pre-selection of villages, Facilitation meeting with community, Assessment of communityinstitutions, Final & Random selection of villages, Baseline survey, Team formation, Selection ofresource for video production, dissemination & editing.

Capacity Building

•Digital Green trainers introduce the components of the system to dedicated staff of the partnerorganizations.

•Video production training, Video editing training, Video dissemination training, Online reportingtraining, Content and quality checking training

Video Production

•The Digital Green system involves the production of short digital videos that average 8-12 minutesin duration on locally relevant agriculture and other livelihood-related subjects, involve localcommunity members, and feature partner field staff and farmers as experts.

•Identification Of Subject/Content, Writing Storyboard, Video Shooting, Video Post-Production,Video Quality Assurance

Dissemination

•Dissemination, an element in the Diffusion component of the Digital Green system, is the processof communicating and spreading information to the community by showing the locally producedvideo film on the subject in a structured and systematic manner.

Adoption

•Increasing the adoption of best farming practices that sustainably improve the livelihoods offarmers is a key objective of any agriculture extension program.

Reporting

•The COCO (Connect Online, Connect Offline) reporting system facilitates the exchange of datafrom across field locations and helps in analysing data trends.


Information Flow-

FarmerBook

It is an open-access platform which

displays detailed timeline-based

activities of each farmer DG works

with along with the villages plotted on

Google Map.

WonderVillage

To see how the core work in the field can

connect with external audiences

who could learn and engage in issues related to rural

development, DG has created a social

game, Wonder Village, which is

hosted on Facebook.

Analytics Dashboard

Built on the COCO database, our

Analytics suite of dashboards provides

near real-time information on performance targets, field operations.

Connect Online Connect Offline

(COCO)

A data management framework, COCO,

forms the foundation of DG's technology

stack. It captures data related to key

processes of DG's model: video

production, farmers involved, seasonality,

dissemination, and adoption of best

practices.

Participation of various people for content

production

Online Video Repository (Villages are sent DVDs)

Local Village Mediators (through shared TV & DVD

player)

Farming Community

Tools used by Digital Green


Analysis

The use of video provides:-

Resource Saving: Human interventions and staff needed are comparatively less

and the cost and time to disseminate information to the other farmers is

considerably reduced.

Accessibility: The major concern of reaching to the illiterate farmers and to make

them understand the use of such methods for their benefit was reduced

substantially as the information dissemination is being done through visual

means and the mediator is always present for answering any queries.

The early results of use of videos showed considerable improvements as the adoption rate

increased 7 fold over classical extensions i.e. Training and Visit model. The key factors that

boosted the substantial gain of DG were the presence of a local mediator who did the work of

engaging the community. The videos were stored in a database repository and can be viewed

repetitive times. It followed an on-demand nature of the video technology and ensured that the

concepts are grasped as well as the novelty was introduced by showcasing new farmers who

were adopting the practices.

Some farmers were incentivized to adopt those practices in order to feature “on TV” and thus,

video technology has played even a larger role in doing so. DG wanted to stimulate the creation

of “local stars”. The more local farmers featured on the videos, the more it helped to reduce

the gap between the experts and farmers, and helped to authenticate the viability of the

content.

DIGITAL VIDEO FOR EXTENSION


Analysis continued…

The following shows the sources of new agricultural information that farmers chose to access

information, based on an online survey. The maximum percentage of information was gathered

from private industries which are mostly agro dealers. The second most accessible source of

information was neighbors. Some of the neighbors had indeed listened to media programs

broadcasted on TV, but none of the farmers had attempted any of the practices.

With the intorduction of Digital Green , an average of 280 farmers attended at least one

screening, and with the videos displaying farmers of other villages working on new practices ,

the farmers started accepting these new techniques. Every month, slightly more than one-half

of the the farmers showed their intentions in adopting one of such practices. Below graph

shows the percentage of farmers that adopted at least one new practice in 2007-2008.

Percentage of farmers adopting at

least one new practice


Cost benefit analysis of Extension Systems

Below is the summary of cost benefit analysis done on the grounds of T&V Control and DG

extension systems. On a cost per adoption basis, DG seemed to have 10 times more benefit and

effectiveness per dollar spent than the earlier extension systems. The farmers felt more

empowered as the decision of new process and techniques were their take and they

themselves were contributing to make their status rise.

Sustainability Initially, it was found that the just curiosity and novelty about the videos was not making this

process sustainable. Some of the videos were watched and liked more widely while others were

not. But the presence of community mediators helped improve the practice as the queries were

answered while the video was being displayed to the farmers. The total costs of Digital Green is

manageable, as video device costs USD 100-150 each, and the Amazon and Google cloud

computing systems which holds the database is such videos, was free to use for public.

As of now, Digital Green organization is trying to make a more self-sustaining business model by

charging a farmer INR 2.00 for watching a video, and it can cover the recurring costs of the

entire system while a charge of INR 4.00 can cover the initial upfront and capital cost. There is a

high possibility of introducing advertisement and also the agro based dealers can have an ad in

their video of the local seeds they sell.

References 1. http://www.digitalgreen.org/

2. http://www.wikipedia.org/

3. Social Development BBL Series: Building and Applying Technology to Amplify the Effectiveness

of People-based Agriculture Extension Systems. July 7, 2011. Speaker: Rikin Gandhi, Executive

Officer at Digital Green.

http://www.digitalgreen.org/

http://www.wikipedia.org/