Digital Green

With a Masters in aeronautical and astronautical space engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelors in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, Rikin Gandhi began his career at Oracle, where he received patents for linguistic search algorithms that he helped develop. Later he joined Microsoft Research India’s Technology for Emerging Markets team, where he researched ways to amplify the effectiveness of agricultural development globally. The time Rikin spent in India’s rural communities changed his life. He developed a passion for helping the country’s rural farmers, whom he saw as heroes. More than a decade later, that passion has become Rikin’s career; in 2006, he co-founded what has become Digital Green.

Smallholder farmers are in crisis. The effects of climate change threaten the viability of traditional approaches to farming. Market disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic impede farmers’ ability to realize value from their produce. Productivity and income within many smallholder farming communities remains stagnant.

Public agricultural extension agencies address these challenges by bringing productive growing techniques to farmers’ fields. As mobile penetration continues its rapid growth across developing economies, technology tools are increasingly suited to amplify their reach and effectiveness. We work, primarily through women farmers, to support extension agencies to deploy a data-driven, video-led approach to agricultural extension that elevates farmer voices and strengthens existing social networks, promoting positive information exchange.

Equipping extension agencies to effectively serve smallholder farming communities will boost the earnings of 12 million farmers by 25%, creating a food system that is more resilient to shocks, and increasing the food supply for tens of millions.

In India and Ethiopia, more than 70% of people rely on agriculture for their livelihoods, often failing to make it profitable and resilient to successive shocks. In India, 80% of economically engaged women work in agriculture. In Ethiopia, 57% are engaged in agriculture, but one third are unpaid. 

Agricultural extension has traditionally followed a one-way information flow; learning, accumulated at universities, was transmitted to farmers by extension agents. While this approach has brought many gains, absent mechanisms to capture and respond to farmers’ feedback, extension agencies struggle to understand what works in farmers’ fields when research is applied outside of university test beds. 

While India and Ethiopia’s public extension systems serve tens of millions of farmers, costly and human capital-intensive approaches struggle to reach marginal farmers with relevant messaging. While many governments have sought to work through private-sector extension approaches, significant gaps remain and depend on public extension agencies, like outreach to female farmers and underserved groups. Globally, more than one million public extension agents serve 570 million smallholder farmers. We aim to boost their effectiveness and improve farmers’ livelihoods through cost-effective, targeted extension that’s responsive to farmers' needs and dedicated to partner capacity building.

Our global team, with offices in India, Ethiopia, and the United States, partners with government agricultural extension agencies to boost farmers’ productivity and income using video-based group learning:

• Short videos on low-cost practices to boost productivity are screened at meetings of women’s self-help groups.

• The locally produced videos are screened at seasonally relevant times and feature nearby women farmers demonstrating productivity boosting farming practices.

• Group facilitators encourage discussion, track questions, and collect data on farmer participation and adoption of promoted practices, informing ongoing content selection.

• Multi-channel messaging -- using interactive voice response (IVR) and WhatsApp -- provides reminders for farmers, boosts adoption rates, and improves cost-effectiveness.

To effectively deploy this cost-effective approach at scale, we work with our partners to develop the internal systems, data tools, and organizational structures that enable the intervention:

• We work with partners to ensure that they understand and use the data collected through the intervention to respond to farmers’ needs.

• We build partner institutions by co-developing clear roles for extension agents, creating performance linked incentive structures, and establishing management structures that enable effective deployment at scale.

• We equip partners to rapidly deploy a large-scale intervention using video-based courseware for extension agent training.

Our team works with smallholder farmers across South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, primarily women with holdings under two hectares.Working with government extension partners, our local teams -- many of whom have agricultural backgrounds -- engage in human centered design assessments to understand the needs of farming communities and work to co-develop solutions. We have identified several challenges:

• Farmers lack access to timely and relevant farming information;

• When farmers do receive information, it’s rarely responsive to bottom-up demand;

• Stagnant productivity has demotivated farmers, many of whom are migrating to cities;

• Low pay and long distances demotivate extension agents, especially women;

• Extension agents lack access to customized content to meet farmer’s needs;

• Performance incentives need improvement to ensure a motivated extension force.

We address these needs by equipping public extension systems to train and manage cadres of extension agents to deploy our extension approach at scale. Public extension systems possess both the will and the dedicated funding to deliver quality extension; however, they lack the organizational structures, data systems and capacities, technology grounding, and content vetting to do so effectively. The Digital Green approach transforms agricultural extension systems, unleashing farmer productivity and boosting their incomes by 25%.

Two billion people rely on small farms to supply their food; many are primarily run by women. Much of the progress of the Green Revolution has left behind smallholder farmers, who lack access to information about the inputs and practices that can unlock their productivity. This challenge is more grave for female farmers; plots of women-headed households are 23% less productive than male-headed plots. 57% of this difference is explained by unequal access to extension services. Digital Green enables even the most marginalized farmers, especially women, to access information, discern what sources to trust, and become prosperous and resilient decision-makers.

In 2006, working at Microsoft Research India, I was inspired by Digital Study Hall, a program that worked to boost the skills of government primary school teachers by exposing them to videos of lessons taught by highly skilled private school teachers. My collaborators Rajesh Veeraraghavan, Kentaro Toyama, and I recognized the power of video to boost farmers aspirations by making them role models, both for themselves and their peers. We tested a variety of outreach approaches to identify the video-based mediated group learning method that continues to form the core of the Digital Green approach today. The approach is grounded in an understanding that successful extension incorporates feedback mechanisms to raise farmers’ voices and make extension systems more demand-driven. We initially tested our approach with the GREEN Foundation in Karnataka, identifying the central elements of locally produced content, structured and frequent facilitated screenings, and a reliance on farmer feedback and data collection to inform the approach.

While many children dream of becoming an astronaut, I made my way well down the path to that career. With a pilot’s license and a masters’ degree in aeronautical & astronautical engineering from MIT, I went to India, the country of my parents’ birth, while I waited to learn if I had been accepted into the U.S. Air Force.

Working with a friend’s biodiesel venture, I experienced Indian farming communities for the first time. I saw that only a small minority of farmers viewed agriculture as a source of prosperity for themselves and their families, while most saw migration from rural areas as the only route to improved livelihoods. Immersing myself in their communities, I saw an opportunity to use videos to inspire these communities, much like Apollo era footage of astronauts on the moon inspired me, and a generation before me, to study math, science and engineering.

In the villages of rural Maharashtra, I had come to understand that my space aspirations served my own ambitions more than they served to elevate the planet. I would soon reject my offer of an Air Force commission to join Microsoft Research, beginning the journey that led to Digital Green.

My background in computer science, engineering, and systems thinking catalyzes my fourteen years of experience using video-led extension to boost the livelihoods of smallholder farmers. Over the past 12 years leading Digital Green, I have:

• Grown the organization to over 100 staff deploying the approach in seven countries currently.

• Led the development of technology tools to track program data, deliver advisory messaging, and match farmers to markets that value their crops.

• Transitioned Digital Green partnerships from smaller nonprofits to large government agencies with the dedicated funding to ensure program sustainability.

• Overseen replication of the Digital Green approach across diverse agricultural, social, and political contexts as we’ve deployed major partnerships with the government of Ethiopia.

• Deployed an analytical approach to addressing social challenges and applying technology for development, drawing on global best practices to constantly iterate the Digital Green approach.

• Recognized the need to grow as an organization to solve challenges that go beyond technology to support development of healthy organizational structures within our partners.

• Deployed technology with an understanding that it serves as a tool to boost existing systems, not a replacement for human interaction.

My successes are grounded in my learning approach to failures. From Digital Green’s founding, our organizational development has been rooted in a philosophy of agile iteration; we try, we collect data, we learn, and we try better. This approach has served me since my initial move to India in 2006, when I worked with a biodiesel venture in Maharashtra.

The venture, which aimed to induce farmers to grow biodiesel feedstock, failed. Farmers preferred growing food crops and, because the gestation period for farmer returns was long, they were unwilling to divert their production for uncertain returns. Despite the weaknesses of the business model, for me personally, the time I spent was an opportunity, not a failure.

Immersing myself in rural India and interacting with farmers, I learned that only a minority of farmers saw agriculture as the root of prosperity. This realization led me to understand that without a transformation of the agricultural systems within which they worked, farmers would lack incentives to invest their limited time and money in the farming techniques that could revolutionize agriculture in developing markets globally. This understanding informed my growth as I altered my life trajectory and began working with Microsoft Research.

In Digital Green’s early days, I made a training video that featured a woman producing biofertilizer. The woman, a widow who lived at her village’s outskirts, had suffered from ostracization in a cultural tradition that often stigmatizes widows.  

When the video was screened in her village, the farmers who watched were stunned to see her projected on their walls. Several went to visit her, breaking down the social barriers that had previously kept them distant; they now believed that she was sharing something they could benefit from.  

 This transformation is at the heart of how videos can elevate farmers, helping them to be "seen" as role models in their community. When we screen new videos, the first questions farmers ask are about the name and village of the featured farmers. Watching astronaut films as a child, I aspired towards what I saw on-screen. Peer learning through the Digital Green approach enriches the existing social networks of farmers to raise their voices and share information. Rural transformation must begin with empowering farmers. For too long, agriculture has been seen as a vocation of last resort. We strive to make it a career of choice, unlocking the productive power of smallholder farmers.

While many technology-enabled extension approaches work around existing public sector systems, Digital Green is dedicated to working with those systems to make them more effective and resilient through consistent, high quality content, devoted farmer feedback mechanisms, and a goal of strengthening the voice of farmers using video as a point of focus. Our approach is:

• Committed to amplifying our transformative impact through women-led extension; video production teams, the farmers featured in videos and extension agents who screen them, and the farmers who view the videos are primarily women.

• Built around systems designed to capture farmer feedback and channel it to support demand driven extension.

• Devoted to a transformational approach to public extension systems that supports our partners to train their teams at scale, respond to farmer needs, and institutionalize the approach for sustained impact even after Digital Green reduces our support role.

• Focused on integrating farmers within the value chains in which they work, developing market linkages to ensure farmers are able to capture the greatest possible value for their produce.

Regular, group-based viewings of community-driven video have five distinct advantages: 

• Reduced costs and time to disseminate highly localized content.

• Role-modeling of “positive deviance” at scale.

• Ability of long-form storytelling to subtly shift cultural norms over an extended time horizon.

• Collective learning and discussion of new practices to facilitate adoption.

• Inclusion of people who lack individual access to technology or extension agents, primarily women.

This approach strengthens self-efficacy and collective agency to build resilience and adaptive capacity over time. 

Inputs

Women who work as extension agents for Digital Green’s partners screen relevant, timely, and targeted video content featuring women farmers to small women’s farmers groups. These videos feature packages of cultivation practices that boost their productivity.

Outputs

Farmers adopt improved farming methods in their fields.

Short-term Outcomes

Farmers receive a 25% boost in income and are able to consume both more calories and more nutritious fruits and vegetables, driving them to continue attending video screenings and adopting practices. Our government partners begin to collect, use, and understand the value of data, enabling them to capture and respond to farmers' needs. Partners institutionalize management structures and performance-linked pay, enabling them to more effectively deploy their large extension agent cadre. Female farmers, who are endowed with authority through their participation in the intervention, accrue decision-making and leadership power both within their households and their communities at large.

Long-term Outcomes

Farmers, benefiting from increased income, more readily adopt new practices and invest in productivity boosting enhancements, such as high-quality seeds and fertilizer. This virtuous cycle drives further welfare enhancing expenditures, such as education, food, and healthcare. The boost in farming output increases the global food supply and availability of healthy foods in rural areas. Farmers who participate in the intervention also benefit from a boost in self-efficacy and increased aspirations; our farmer-centric approach to extension elevates their voices and gives them the confidence to improve their agricultural livelihoods and that of their surrounding communities. 

Extension systems are able to vastly multiply their reach by operationalizing the Digital Green approach, which has been demonstrated to deliver practice adoptions at one tenth the cost of traditional extension methods. As our partners benefit from the Digital Green approach, they begin to deploy it across programs outside of our partnership, amplifying their effectiveness system wide.

Through our video learning approach, we have served about 3.6 million farmers, most of whom are women. A 2019 MIT J-PAL randomized control trial found that Digital Green’s approach was five-times more cost-effective and increased farmer productivity by 45%. In one year, we will have reached 2 million additional farmers. In five years, we will have scaled the solution to 12 million farmers with videos that are primarily produced by women, feature women, screened by women extension agents, and watched by women farmers. By mainstreaming a female-focus within our approach, we are able to boost uptake of improved practices and position the women farmers we engage as sources of information and authority in their households and the broader community.

Within the next year, we will reach 2 million new smallholder farmers, 70% of whom will be women, increasing their net earnings by 25%. In five years, we will scale the solution to 12 million smallholder farmers. In doing so, we will build the capacities of our partner organizations to effectively integrate the approach within their existing extension systems.

We are giving attention to individual incentives to drive a transition from top-down decision-making to systems in which women farmers drive decisions. For example, extension agents are not just motivated by improvements in farmer livelihoods; they are motivated by the idea that farmer satisfaction could lead to career progression, which means performance metrics must reflect it. Similarly, to justify and expand public investment, extension leadership needs cost effectiveness data. Farmers show greater interest in providing feedback when they see the system respond, see pathways to leadership roles in governance committees or the extension service, and when they reap tangible returns on their farms. By thinking about incentives of individuals within the system, it becomes easier to narrow the data collected and encourage a culture of data utilization.

Government Capacity

Our success depends on the ability of public extension systems to deploy the intervention through new and existing field staff, and to maintain the data systems that support it. Our partners must establish effective management structures, ensure a well trained extension cadre, and develop quality content that serves farmers. We must also work with partners to ensure that they recognize the value of our women-led approach, incorporating women into the intervention from farmer outreach to extension management. 

Aligning Incentives For Sustained Impact

Digital Green will succeed only if stakeholders (partners and farmers) realize value; the approach must be sustained through government ownership and it must continue to generate value for its beneficiaries through new and expanding uses. Partners often begin with either poorly designed data management systems or none at all. Ensuring that they see value from new data tracking obligations ensures their buy-in on data systems and processes.

Technology Appropriateness 

Over-reliance and investment in any one technology can limit innovation in the face of a rapidly evolving agritech sector. As smartphone and mobile data penetration explode in rural India and Ethiopia, farmers' access to digital tools is quickly expanding. Successful deployment of our intervention requires an iterative and agile approach, incorporating multiple delivery channels and technologies. The simplicity of our video approach allows us to communicate rich information to farmers without demanding technology use on their part. But with group screenings constrained by the ongoing pandemic, diverse digital tools offer new approaches to achieve impact at scale.

Government Capacity

To ensure that extension staff are supported on the ground, we train field staff and equip our partners with digital courseware that facilitates capacity building at scale. When initiating partnerships or expanding to new regions, our focus is placed on skill development, diagnosing organizational gaps, helping partners establish effective governance structures, and ensuring women are engaged at every level of the intervention. As partnerships mature, we work with extension agencies to co-develop and track institutionalization metrics to ensure that they will be able to take over the intervention as Digital Green draws down it’s day-to-day support.

Aligning Incentives For Sustained Impact

The approach will improve the incomes of smallholder farmers through access to timely, relevant, and targeted content. This will increase their demands on extension agents, who in turn will be incentivized through performance targets to respond to farmer feedback and demand. At a systems level, we have witnessed our partners’ reach and impact expand through adoption of the Digital Green approach. This success incentivizes them to replicate the video model and data systems that undergird it across their programs, independent of their partnership with Digital Green, amplifying our impact.

Technology Appropriateness

Multi-channel delivery and a culture committed to testing and deploying new routes to farmer impact is integral to our approach. This has meant incorporating technology-based approaches to integrate weather and soil data into targeted messages, reaching farmers through complementary messaging channels like WhatsApp and IVR, and deploying satellite imaging to evaluate impact at scale.

In India, we partner with the National Rural Livelihood Mission through our role as a National Support Organization. Our interventions are directly carried out by State Rural Livelihood Missions, namely JEEViKA, the Jharkhand State Livelihood Promotion Society, and the Odisha Livelihood Mission in the Indian states of Bihar, Jharkhand, and Odisha, respectively. In Ethiopia, we partner with the Ministry of Agriculture at the national level and implement our interventions in conjunction with the Regional Bureaus of Agriculture in each region in which we operate. Through USAID’s Developing Local Extension Capacity (DLEC) project, we’ve generated evidence for digitally-enabled approaches to improve rural advisory services that guide government, private sector, and civil society extension providers in ways that best fit country contexts. Our DLEC engagements range across South and Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America.

Digital Green’s primary beneficiaries are smallholder farmers in India. We support our partners, typically government extension agencies, with whom our interventions are co-developed, and who finance the intervention’s operational cost through capital and dedicated personnel. 

We publish intervention data and impact results and open-source our technology so that outside organizations may replicate the approach and contribute to it. Digital Green’s global set of offices in Bhubaneswar, Bangalore, Delhi, Ranchi, Patna, and Addis Ababa provide video-based training and backstopping support, enabling partners to use our products and services, while our San Francisco office oversees strategic planning and partnerships.

Our government partners work with us because we share their objectives of improving farmer productivity and livelihoods and inclusively connecting them to markets with a focus on women and youth. Independent randomized control trials have proven our impact and cost-effectiveness and our partners recognize our ability to make their work more affordable, impactful, and scalable. The work we are proposing builds on the foundations we’ve created and the strong partnerships we’ve formed with public extension providers -- including their past investments and ongoing commitments which directly fund key operational costs. 

Digital Green is a non-profit organization and as such relies on philanthropic donor funding. This operational funding is augmented by co-investment from our government partners, typically national and state public extension agencies, to support sustained deployment of our solutions. Our innovations allow the public agricultural extension systems with which we partner to operate more efficiently; repeated studies have demonstrated that the Digital Green approach delivers adoptions at one-tenth the cost of traditional extension services. Because our government partners see gains in efficiency and increased scale made possible through our partnerships, we’re able to catalyze public investment in effective extensions services. To date, our government extension partners have invested $23.2 million to deploy Digital Green’s video extension approach within their existing extension programs, and they have committed an additional $11 million to sustain and scale it. We are also exploring revenue generating market-linkage and cooperative models that could deepen farmers’ engagement with the value chains within which they work and diversify Digital Green funding sources beyond philanthropic and public investment.

We received grant funding from bilateral, multilateral and philanthropic donors and the private sector between May 2019 - May 2020. Project funding came primarily from the following sources:

• Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: $5.4 million (grant funding in Ethiopia)

• USAID: $4.8 million (grant funding in India, Nepal and globally)

• World Bank: $196,000 (grant funding in Ethiopia and Kenya)

• AGRA (Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa): $70,419 (project funding in South Sudan)

• Pepsi: $67,000 (project funding India)

We have also received unrestricted global grants and awards from:

• Mulago Foundation: $200,000

• University of Pennsylvania Lipman Family Prize: $100,000

• Fast Forward: $62,000

We seek to raise $2.5 million over the next 2 years to deepen our impact in India by reaching farmers with more targeted messages focused on raising productivity and incomes. 

We are also pursuing multiple funding opportunities to support pivots and experimentation to ensure farmers continue to have access to timely, customized information and markets even amidst disruptions caused by COVID-19.

Estimated 2020 organization-wide operating expenses are $8 million inclusive of all staff, project and overhead costs.

Government Capacity & Aligning Incentives  

We look to faculty and students from MIT’s Technology and Policy Program for guidance on institutionalizing our video approach within the existing structures of our government partners. Specifically, we hope for support in developing an institutionalization approach that builds ownership, increases the role of farmer feedback and engages more women. We want to go beyond reaching more female farmers to boost the participation of women within extension systems, including management, training, video production, and dissemination roles. We see MIT’s OpenCourseWare platform as a potential route to working across the diverse linguistic and connectivity environments in which we work, allowing women farmers and extension agents to participate despite challenges of gendered access to public space.

Technology Appropriateness

We look for support as we explore alternative channels for distributing videos as we develop a WhatsApp chatbot built on MIT Media Lab's work with "Empathy learning, socially-aware agents". We hope for technical input as we work with NASA to draw on satellite imaging data to deliver better targeted messaging. We also look for support as we gather farmer feedback through this new extension modality. Direct-to-farmer digital outreach approaches are taking on a new relevance as extension agencies struggle to work effectively in the context of the ongoing pandemic. With more than 60 million views on our YouTube channel, we’re working to leverage this massive library of extension content in an increasingly connected rural India. 

Digital Green will benefit from partners and support as we:

• Expand and diversify our board and seek coaching for our leadership team;

• Seek to obtain significant new and more diverse funding from the private sector as we scale our proven approach globally;

• Work across multiple country contexts and adapt to local needs and systems as we replicate our approach in new geographies; and 

• Refine our data and technology standardization and policies.

We plan to partner with international agricultural centers, such as the CGIAR, to help ensure that our messaging features high-quality vetted practices and inform their research agendas. 

We hope to partner with NASA to leverage its remote sensing capabilities. As we seek cost effective approaches to meet farmer needs, earth observing satellite data can help us respond to the growing challenge of climate change by mapping farmer plots, measuring yields, evaluating soil composition, and diagnosing groundwater availability. 

We will continue to collaborate with our research partners, including those at J-PAL, to establish evidence for our work using randomized control trials. 

We will work with technology partners, such as WhatsApp, to enable farmers to interact with our videos more directly as rural South Asia and Africa undergo a boom in digital connectivity.