Tunas by Bahtera DwipaAbadi Foundation

Through digitalization of the whole ecosystem, our aim is to solve some long-standing problems in the coconut farming ecosystem in the rural wetlands in Indonesia, which include but not limited to market transparency (middleman curbing the potential income of farmers), limitation to farmers’ knowledge and operational efficiency (market and logistics), and limited access to financial supports, education, health and more. 

Adopting the circular economy model, this emerging mobile platform include various aspects of life that will transform livelihood and quality of the people within the ecosystem. It includes multiple features on sustainable agriculture, job opportunity and creation, filling in the gap of inaccessible banking facilities that include e-money, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer financial features as well as market aggregator, and welfare components that include education, charity programs and projects, religious, health, waste management, and other environmental projects. 

Indonesia is often referred to as the world's largest archipelago, consisting of 17,499 islands with a long coastline of 81,000 km and its waters consist of territorial sea, archipelagic waters and inland waters covering 2.7 million km or 70% of the territory of Indonesia.

In the market entry phase, Tunas app is aimed to serve 1 million users in Indragiri Hilir, Indonesia as the pilot project. With its vast area of 11,5000km2 sitting on the east coast of Sumatra mainland, Indragiri Hilir sits on natural wetlands and swamps where boats are the main mode of transport for crops, goods and people to commute. This natural landscape limits mobility of people, goods and services into the area. This situation result ‘live in a cocoon’ for its people where there is inequality of chance to basic infrastructure, clean water, education and health services as well as threat towards food resilience. As an emerging platform and digitally connecting the ecosystem to the rest of the world, Tunas will improve the mobility of goods, services and people within as well as into the ecosystem by means of partnerships and development of new markets, hence transforming the livelihood of the people within the ecosystem overtime. 

The emerging digital platform is a vehicle to connect various aspects of life of the people within the ecosystem from commercial, communities and individuals. Coupling the digital platform and our foundation’s various partnership programs, it is expected that there will be inflow of new technologies, talents and finances into the ecosystem from outside the ecosystem thus not only improving the efficiency of existing markets, but also create new markets, new job opportunities and enhancing quality of life. This platform is mainly in the form of mobile app that consists features of marketplace for crop and farming needs, logistics and transportation of crops, goods and services. 

The platform includes utilization of e-money technologies, forecasting and analytical tools for agricultural management, crowdsourcing technologies, electronic marketplace, and big data technology. These technologies will be supported by satellite telecommunication infrastructure, cloud computing, satellite imagery for agricultural analytics, geo-positioning technology and mobile devices provision at implementation phase. 

The digital platform is focused on inclusiveness with scalability in mind. Users of the platform are multiple personas from and intersecting various members of social groups and communities. Within the ecosystem, the majority of the actors who will be the focus of beneficiaries include estate owners, farm workers, transporters (boat owners, drivers, crews), crop buyers (industrial and non-industrial buyers), plantation service providers (equipment renters, plantation rehabilitation and construction service providers) and all their family members. As these people dwell on water, many of them are also fishermen.

Most of their income is derived from household income. It is not a rare occurrence that schooling-aged children dropped out of school to work in the farm or other jobs to fulfil household income and basic living needs of the family. Similarly, it is not a rare occurrence that the women bear 8-9 children and continuously obliged to stay at home to care for their infants and unable to contribute to household income productively. With digitalizing the ecosystem, it is expected that there will be improvement in their income through their core income-deriving activities through efficiency and transparency of markets, hence creating a shift in social and customary structures that will allow children a better equality in education and welfare for better generation of humans. Furthermore, the online platform will also allow the foundation to multi-fold its efforts in educational outreach for both adults and children alike.

Digitalizing the ecosystem with the platform means that the platform will connect various stakeholders and roles within the entire ecosystem. It will not only transform the lives of the farmers, but it will revolutionize the whole ecosystem to become even more inter-connected and inclusive.

With live online commodity price and crop marketplace feature, farmers will have access to transparency of pricing from final buyers, hence bypassing the information asymmetry designed by middlemen. With estate data information and harvest forecasting as well as sustainable farming knowledge sharing features, farmers will be able to improve on their farming operations that is leaning towards sustainability while having the chance to improve their income flows.

Transportation (water) of crops and goods is in itself an entire market that is still highly inefficient due to the cost of making the boats and lack of people working within the market. The transportation / logistic features of the platform will allow crops to be transported seamlessly as it will create high heterogeneous ways of transporting goods that can cater small harvest for smallholder farmers by boat-sharing to large harvest by boat-rental. The idea of the transportation feature is to create a bridge between farmers, transporters and direct buyers on the one way trip, and general goods distributors, transporters, and general goods retail buyers on the return way trip to maximize efficiency of transporting business.

Due to it’s remoteness and heterogeneity of villages that dwell on these wetlands, many common facilities become not viable, including conventional financial institutions, health and educational services, even telecommunication services. Financial and Telecommunication solutions are essentially parts of this project.

Most of current transactions within the ecosystem are done by cash transactions. Inaccessibility to conventional banking system due to transportation and distance is the main contribution of cash practices. To tackle this problem, the platform will utilize unique tokenized e-money (and e-wallet), peer-to-peer and crowdfunding feature, and market aggregator for conventional banking to connect various scale of investors to potential investment opportunities within the ecosystem. Digitalization of transactions and financial solutions will improve commercial efficiency and capacity, hence improving the welfare of the communities.

On welfare front of the platform, the platform is aimed to bridge between health and education service providers and potential recipients on online basis. The platform will target health practitioners, even those outside of the ecosystem, to contribute or to have a chance to have patients online hence benefiting both the service providers and recipients.

The communities, with the digital mobile platform, eventually will get equal access to healthcare despite the remoteness of their dwelling as the platform will allow them to look for the closest doctor, clinics or hospitals. Coupled with our foundation’s work in the pipeline for mobile water (boat)  clinics, Emergency Services will eventually become available to the communities without the need to transport themselves to the closest hospital, which often may take up to half a day and are often too late. The health feature of the platform is aimed at equality of health access, improvement of the population health through online mass health outreach programs and eventually altering behaviors towards health that ameliorates the livelihood overtime.

Based on our study, there are various reasons that children of the farmers withdrawn from schooling varying from lack of understanding from the parents towards education (hence asking their school-aged children to work instead of obtaining education) to inability of the parents to fund for their children’s education. With implementation of circular economy model of the overall platform, this mobile platform will not only connect educators/schools to potential students as well as bridging scholarship programs to potential talented children, but it will also provide contextual, non-conventional education that are not captured in our government’s education system hence filling the gap that inhibits equal chance to education for Indonesian children.

With 30 years of experience of servicing the remote rural wetland communities of Indragiri Hilir, the digital platform is also aimed to allow our foundation to improve knowledge, detect societal changes and improving the resolution of need analysis of the communities at an accelerated rate in order for the foundation to be able to multi-fold its impacts from its efforts including beyond its current service regions. 

The digital platform is focused on inclusiveness with scalability in mind. Tunas App will answer the problems of asymmetry of information that results in inefficiency of market for coconut farmers' low income due to ineffective top-bottom approach as well as the middlemen exploitation. With symmetry of information, equal chance for farmers, transporters, communities and other members of the community within the ecosystem will be created hence creating digital inclusion and will ultimately improve the welfare of the entire communities within the ecosystem.         

Digitalizing the entire ecosystem that is operating in a highly remote area where technological literacy is low and internet penetration is very challenging due to its natural landscape requires time to understand the problems and to find their fitting solutions. The conception of the idea started 2 years ago and since then solutions have been explored and the roadmap has been created. However, due to lack of funding, a prototype is yet immaterialized. In order for us to move on to the pilot stage, we need to secure sufficient resources to ensure successful implementation and its sustainable operation. 

The platform is innovative to the current ecosystem that will change the way of lives of its communities beyond commercial transactions. Remote wetland areas such as Indragiri Hilir, Riau, Indonesia has been experiencing chronic underdevelopments that are supposed to be government domains (top-bottom approach). The platform will give a bottom-top approach (by empowering the people) that will allow development of the whole region.

Tunas takes on holistic and comprehensive approach as it touches the entire aggregate of the ecosystem and all aspects of human life. It is developed based on exploration of human-centered environments for their capacity to transform quality of life. It is developed based on the users' heterogenous backgrounds by investigating their needs, values and requirements as a basis for a more systemic solution. It combines research from the design sciences, education, human-computer interaction and data mining. It is focused on creating technology as a bridge to agency capacity to enrich and transform their lives through understanding their needs. It is accessible to all users from different technological literacy. 

Furthermore, during the implementation phase, the foundation will also provide customized support to users. 

Outcome in 1 year: 1,000 users across multiple locations in Indragiri Hilir. 

Outcome in 5 years: 1 millions users across multiple locations in Indragiri Hilir. 

Outcome in 1 year: 

1,000 users across multiple locations in Indragiri Hilir. 

80% of participants have better knowledge and skill using Mobile Application.

80% of participants have sustainable business and increase monthly income.

Measurement Plan: 

Track number of participants in every location

Track number of traffic and people download the application

Retain engagement with participants within 1 year monitoring and evaluation program.

Entry of external partnership for every module of the platform (inflow of either/and talents and/or technology and/or funds from outside the current ecosystem)

Full – Time Staffs:

1. Tay Ciaying – Executive Director

2. Budiman Husain - IT Manager

3. Iva Ramadhany - Development Foundation Coordinator

4. Linda Puspita - Partnership & Liaison Officer

Part – Time Staffs:

1. Fajri Usman

2. Hansel 

We are a team that consist of combination of skills that can be resourceful for the development of the Tunas app, which are: UI/UX design, mobile design, web development, industrial product design, project manager, IT & engineering consultant, trading, education field, various human institutions, telecommunication and researchers

We believe that SOLVE is a great platform since it is supported by professional and reliable team members as the bridge to connect our project with the respective partners, investors and funders. Therefore, we take the initiative to take a part in this challenge and join SOLVE community. It is a great opportunity to collaborate with SOLVE Community in order to build regional/international links and establish networks around the world.  

Tunas app currently seeks partners and more organizations for longer term investing, expanding client base, more branding exposure, connecting with tech savvy for assistance with tech development and technology donations including smartphone donations. We also seek Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) expertise to build robust processes to use data to increase social engagement and business strategy expertise to scale responsibly.  

We are constantly participating to solve the needs and problems of underserved societies through creative solutions and sustainable innovation. We strive to create business value in ways that are innovative, financially sustainable, scalable and make positive social impact to communities through Tunas mobile app.

We welcome collaborations with individuals, companies or other organizations to find innovative solutions, make a social impact and achieve competitive advantage. 

We are very happy to collaborate with the surrounding society. We believe in sharing technology, ideas and thinking with our partners for mutual benefit and better outcomes. Through partnerships, we can challenge our approach, complement our own expertise with external knowledge, and deliver improved outcomes. We collaborate with a wide range of partners and we welcome suggestions for new partnerships.