Project Mooo

‘Project Mooo’ offers rural youth and women new approach to attaining skills using demand driven analytics. ‘Mooo app’ encourages them to join the workforce and pursue dairy as a sustainable agribusiness opportunity. We aim to double the income of 1 million rural youth and women across developing countries by 2021.

We believe the public extension services to skill marginalised farmers on new techniques and technologies is broken in most developing countries and is not built for scale. ‘Project Mooo’ as a last mile skills provider is going to change this through a 3-step solution:

• Going into rural communities through a fully equipped mobile van
• Leveraging data analytics through ‘App’ to offer demand-led-extension training to farmers (specialised training via Bootcamps)
• Developing rural youth and women as village entrepreneurs (who offer extension service at a commission)

The novel model of learning at finger tips and reaching experts on click of a button will not only enhance income for rural youth and women but also reduce the skill gap, unemployment and rural to urban migration.   

In India more than 60m women are engaged in Dairy as a livelihood but youth is no longer pursuing agribusiness as a viable career option. To change this,the analytics based learning approach follows the ‘just-in-time learning’ model offering skills and techniques that will have an immediate impact on the productivity and income. The app (scalable across countries) maps the life cycle of each cattle owned by farmers, offers learning videos and tools, connects to local experts, and provides benchmarking stats to increase competitiveness among youth.

Project Mooo not only empowers the rural disadvantaged youth and women with lifelong skills required in the future workforce but offers micro-credentials to bring them into the formal employment system by gaining credits against the national skills qualification framework (via Skill India project, in India only 2% are formally skilled as compared to Korea where it is 96%). The bootcamp training offers dairy specialised skills, the AgTech rural start-ups by village entrepreneurs inculcates entrepreneurial skills while the Mooo App develops technical, analytical and cognitive skills of the youth.

Agriculture is the world’s largest provider of jobs employing nearly 40% of the global workforce. Yet the rural youth in developing countries leave agriculture and migrate to urban areas due to lack of access to need based skills training and formal employment opportunities. The situation is further exacerbated for women. On top of the problems already mentioned, rural women (who are the backbone of agriculture and allied sectors) face a major problem of mobility and flexibility and hence never enter the formal training system.

We conducted enough on-ground surveys with key stakeholders to conclude that agriculture can be transformed by providing access to specialised demand driven extension training (e.g. The knowledge on how to prevent and treat mastitis disease can increase the milk output by 30% thereby increasing farmer income between 10-20%). Our pilot with UNDP on rural women entrepreneurship (covered by DFAT under Australian by Degree series) taught us how Agribusiness can be key to rural prosperity. The analytic approach to just-in-time learning provides rural youth and women with the mobility and flexibility they require to join the workforce. 

Project Mooo aims to double the income of small marginalised young rural farmers. We envision to scale the project and have over 1 million farmers (atleast 1/3rd being women) on the app by 2021. Most importantly it requires working for a common purpose with diverse range of stakeholders such as milk producer companies, farmer cooperatives, farm input organisations, experts and government to strengthen the extension training system for rural youth. All these stakeholders would be able to see individualised dashboards that will equip them to make better decisions for providing demand led training extension. 

Analytics such as

• No. of queries raised to village entrepreneurs both online & offline

• No. of videos watched on specialised topics

• No. of specialised trainings conducted through Mooo Van and Bootcamps

• No. of rural youth certified - Strengthen the demand led extension training

Track downloads, learning activity and analyse dashboards - 1 million young farmers

The Mooo App calculates the increase in income of dairy farmer through the increased milk output (milk yield per cow) - Double the income of small marginalised dairy farmers

Our solution uses a unique mix of big data analytics, just-in-time learning and mobile learning van to revolutionise the agricultural private extension training and encourage entrepreneurship among rural youth. Most technology developed in this field is neither affordable, nor accessible and does not cater to small fragmented farmers (with less than 1 hectare of land and 2 milch animals) that form the majority of rural population in the developing countries. The solution provides rural youth with access to formal learning through micro credentials that yields immediate and sustainable impact on their family income. 

Project Mooo and the app has an intuitive design keeping in mind the educational as well as cognitive level of rural youth and women. It is extremely simple, user friendly and offered in regional languages. The features in the Mooo app directly benefits the young farmers to increase dairy productivity and the village entrepreneurs to offer demand based extension training services. The users can reach out for help on a click of a button, know how others in the communities are performing and gain additional skills through collaboration with their peers in the local region.   

A fully equipped Mooo van will tour the villages to conduct Bootcamp trainings thus overcoming the problem of mobility for the rural women and farmers. The Mooo app will be available on the app store free of cost in the pilot phase. Further, every village entrepreneur will be provided with a tablet to feed the data on behalf of the farmers who don’t have access to a mobile phone yet. The milk cooperatives and farm input companies, etc. will offer rewards to youth who are participatory in learning and conducting training workshops for peers in the village, block or district. 

In the initial phase, we are approaching corporates to tap into their corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds. Indian companies with an average net profit of more than 800k USD (over three years) are required by law to spend atleast 2% of their net profits every year on CSR. Last year in India over 57m USD were spent as part of CSR Funds on ‘Skills Development’.

As we grow the users of the app, including young farmers, input companies, experts (such as VETs) will all pay a very nominal fee per user per month. As we scale, the data collected through the app will be analysed to provide unique insights to all dairy industry stakeholders such as pharmaceutical companies, feed suppliers, milk producer companies and government organisations.

Contrary to global scenario, social enterprises in India still face a challenge in accessing corporate social responsibility funds as the concept of social enterprises is not widely accepted in the public definition of the government regulation. The corporates still favour not for profit organisations for the selection of developmental projects and the disbursement of these funds. In addition, there could be limits to the adoption of technology solution as lot of customisation is required to meet regional aspirations, language challenges and making in demand training content available across diverse range of topics at speed.  

https://www.facebook.com/projectmooo/

Winning a pitch with MIT Solve aligns with our fundamental belief of triple AAA (Awareness, Access and Action). We believe that the Solvers community will provide us with much needed collaboration and wide spectrum of experiences to solve real grass roots challenges in developing countries. Through its partnership network, MIT Solve can provide us with the initial access to capital and technology to perfect the model before we scale. The mentorship offered will guide us as we gear up to scale because it is this stage where most stumble. 

Creative Agri Solutions is a technical advisory firm working in Agriculture to train youth

AgNext is technology partner to provide hardware, software and analytics-as-a-service to enable access to precision farming

Baani Milk is the milk producer company setup by National Dairy Development Board; providing us with access to 10500 farmers