AgriMove: Connecting farmers

66% of Nepal’s population depends on agriculture for their livelihood, contributing to 21.3% of its GDP. However, the agriculture sector's contribution to GDP has been declining rapidly; from 38.2% in 2000 to 33.2% in 2010 to 21.3% in 2021. However, the share of the population relying on Agriculture has not kept up with this decline, with 66% of the total population still relying on this industry even today. Over the years, farmers' income has been decreasing compared to other industries in Nepal perpetuating more disinvestment in the sector and making farmers more vulnerable to climate change and globalization-induced migration to Gulf countries. 

The problem points out an immediate need to increase efficiency in the current agriculture sector to increase the household income of the 66% of the population who relies on it. 

27% of the total farmers in Nepal practice 'subsistence farming' with land holdings of 0.5-1 ha. i.e. 5.34 million people depend on subsistence farming. These small to medium-scale farmers do not have enough land or capital to practice commercial farming nor have enough scale to connect with the market on their own. Due to Nepal's hilly and mountainous topography and lack of physical infrastructure, these farmers are largely disconnected from one another and from the market thus having to rely completely on the brokers to reach the market, get market data on supply and demand, and get fair prices for their goods. 

The current supply chain economy for these farmers is largely informal which has posed many challenges for them:

1. Intransparency of cash movement between brokers and farmers creates distrust.

2. Manual record-keeping of agri-goods collection and reconciliation of payments. It is a tedious and inefficient process to maintain transaction details on papers and registers. It opens up the possibility of conflict between farmers and brokers in case of any mismatch of data and puts farmers with little formal education in a vulnerable position.

3. Possible financial distress of farmers in the case of delayed payment, which possesses a significant impact on farmers as they might have to rely on informal credit mechanisms in order to continue their daily maintenance and needs.

4. Lack of financial services offered to farmers, leading to farmers not having access to formal financial mechanisms to save their income, access insurance, or loans to gain credit to purchase cattle, seeds, fertilizers, or other inputs.

As a result, there is a high-level inefficiency in farms because of the combined effects of scale inefficiency, informal financial mechanisms, and the disconnect of farmers from the market and each other. These need to be solved in order to increase investment and efficiency in labor, land, seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, equipment, and transportation which are key determinants to increasing farmers' profitability.

Details about our Solution

Our solution AgriMove is a mobile app and web-based digital platform that connects farmers with other farmers, buyers, and markets to bridge the current information and communication barrier that exists due to physical disconnectedness caused by Nepal's topography, language barriers, and unavailability of physical infrastructures. It utilizes the far and wide-reaching internet accessibility and the increasing smartphone ownership in Nepal. Currently, 90.56% of Nepali have access to the Internet, and 73% use smartphones. 

Farmers and buyers can create an account in our app/website where they can add the location of their farm. The app has 4 major sections:

1. Buying and selling of goods: Farmers can initiate sales by putting up their product, quantity, quality, and sell-by information. The buyers can then bid for it through the platform. Farmers can choose the option that is best for them. Only farmers can initiate the sale and buyers will only use the platform to bid. Farmers would be able to identify fair pricing for their goods by looking at the market trends data mentioned in point no. 4 below.

2. Personal Page: Farmers and buyers will each have personal pages that show their lifetime transaction history, payables, loans, and other financial calculations. It's a simple page where they can also create their personal logbook entering their overall expenses and income on the farm. 

3. Communicating with fellow farmers and buyers, updating statuses, creating groups, messaging features, liking, commenting, and sharing: This will help farmers connect to other farmers, and initiate opportunities like ridesharing for goods transportation, bulk buying of fertilizers, and timesharing for technical equipment that are difficult to rent on their own. This will also help initiate opportunities for advance payments, investment in quality seeds, and pre-harvest buyout contracts between farmers and buyers. The technology only provides a networking platform and allows individuals to continue communication outside of the platform in modes that are the most feasible and convenient for them. 

4. Market data: This page would be dedicated to presenting market statistics on product pricing, and market trends. It will also recommend what is best to harvest for the following season based on the location and market needs. Furthermore, this page helps inform the farmers about news stories relevant to their farming needs; such as the launch of new government grants in agriculture, news on agro-innovations, etc. 

Overall, the main goal of the platform is to solve the barriers in communication between farmers and markets to empower the farmers to make the best financial decisions for themselves, and to formalize the agri-goods supply-chain system using a digital platform.

Note: the images of the prototype are currently in English, but the real app will offer multiple language choices to accommodate more than 10 major languages spoken in Nepal.

27% of the total farmers in Nepal practice 'subsistence farming' with land holdings of 0.5-1 ha. i.e. 5.34 million people in Nepal depend on subsistence farming. 

These small to medium-scale farmers do not have enough land or capital to practice commercial farming nor have enough scale to connect with the market on their own. Due to Nepal's hilly and mountainous topography and lack of physical infrastructure, these farmers are largely disconnected from one another and from the market thus having to rely completely on the brokers to reach the market, get market data on supply and demand, and get fair prices for their goods. 

Our solution AgriMove is a digital platform (mobile app and web-based) that provides a platform for these small to medium-scale farmers to connect with other farmers, brokers, and markets. By simply connecting the key players in the agri-goods supply chain network together, and providing simple digital tools (mentioned below) we can unlock solutions to solve some key challenges we addressed earlier. 

Tool: Connect the farmers with other farmers

We connect the currently disconnected farmers in our platform to enable the economy of scale by giving opportunities for bulk buying of seeds and fertilizers, shared transportation of agri goods, and increase usage of modern tools and technologies using time sharing. Farmers can also communicate with each other to decide on crops for the season and benefit from bulk farming. 

Tool: Digitization of financial transactions

The app keeps records of each payment transaction; even if the payment is made in cash. This enables farmers to build their creditworthiness which they can use to raise capital investment for their farms. This data can help them acquire loans from banks or microfinance institutes. Recordkeeping also reduces conflicts about payments, which is especially beneficial for farmers with low literacy levels.

Similarly, the app history works as a digital contract and provides added security to the farmers doing business with other farmers or brokers/businesses.

Tool: Connect the farmers with the buyers and market data

Using machine learning, we enable farmers to know market demands and predict future trends in order to reduce post-harvest risk and have better investment prospects from buyers if a certain product is high in demand.

Farmers can use this feature to raise advance payments from buyers for a certain crop that is guaranteed to be in demand next season. This enables risk sharing of farming with other stakeholders instead of farmers taking all the risk.

Similarly, farmers can easily access information on market rates for their crops for that day/week/month for their location enabling them to demand fair pricing for their goods.

The app will also allow farmers to connect with non-local buyers and international buyers, allowing them a choice that they might not have had earlier.

Tool:  Farmers rating and buyers rating

Allowing both farmers and buyers to rate each other could help build trust, make confident purchases, motivate farmers for quality control, and attain a better value for their products. 

All three of our team members were born and raised in developing countries facing similar challenges in the agri-goods system. We have been developing this project since Fall 2022 with mentorships from the MIT Martin Trust Center of Entrepreneurship. We have done Primary Market Research by interviewing 25+ farmers to validate our problems and understand their pain points. We plan to conduct more interviews as we move forward with the project. Similarly, we have been in talks with digital platforms similar to AgriMove in India to understand the problem in the region better.

Our team has identified Makwanpur District in the hills of central Nepal as our Pilot location. It is our team member Shrinkhala's home district where she was born and raised and went to school. She is well connected with the local community and the social and political leaders there through the health-center initiative that she worked on for 2 years in 2018/2019. We are committed to investing more time on the ground research, inputs, prototype testing, and design iterations in the next stages of the project.

Shrinkhala, our team lead, is an Architect/Urban Planner from Nepal and is going back to Nepal right after graduation this June and will be based there. She has past experience working with one of the most rural and vulnerable communities in Makawanpur, Nepal for more than 2 years, designing, fundraising, and building a health center through her own non-profit initiative that is currently serving a 5000+ population in the region. She is also well recognized in Nepal with one of the highest social media followings on Instagram with 1mil+ followers. This platform and reach will be highly beneficial to reach a large number of farmers in the initial phases of the project design, prototyping, and testing.

Juanita is from Indonesia and has worked in the architecture industry with expertise in leading project teams in the design, documentation, and execution of life-cycle projects. Her current academic training focuses on interdisciplinary urban analytics, transportation, and entrepreneurship coursework. She also had experience working with non-profit organizations in community engagement in Indonesia. In addition, she has had a deep interest in innovation and entrepreneurship from a very young age, starting her first venture when she was 12 years old and running several businesses in architectural services and architectural education before MIT.

Zinan, equipped with a computer science and design background, focuses on building MVP and user tests. Her technical knowledge will push Agrimove from idea to product. She will lead a team to explore further technical fields, such as AI, to suggest and recommend the match between farmers and buyers. She had experience building both web products and app products. As a designer, she is familiar with the user testing framework and iterates the product. Growing up in China, she observed the same situation with her grandparents living in Shanxi Province. With Agrimove, she believes that the team can impact the farmers to provide a higher quality of life. 

Our solution is a prototype rather than a concept because it has been developed to a stage where it can be tested and refined based on real-world feedback. Our prototype has gone through several rounds of development, including design, testing, and iteration based on user feedback. We have also conducted market research and analyzed industry trends to ensure that our solution meets a real need in the market. We interviewed 2 similar startups in India to test our idea. Furthermore, we have talked to 25+ farmers in Dhading and Makawanpur (our targeted pilot district). By creating a prototype, we are able to gather feedback from potential users and stakeholders, identify areas for improvement, and refine our solution before bringing it to market.

In addition to that, we also have been talking with e-Sewa, the largest digital wallet company in Nepal regarding future partnerships and providing micro-loans (<$500 USD) to farmers based on their three-months creditworthiness for the pilot project.

An investment company in Nepal, Next Venture Corp, has shown interest to invest in Agrimove for us to sustain the prototype development.

Overall, our prototype represents a significant investment in time and resources, and demonstrates our commitment to creating a solution that is both innovative and impactful. We believe that our prototype has the potential to revolutionize the industry, and we are excited to continue refining and testing it as we move towards a full-scale launch.

Our aim would be to scale it nationwide in Nepal. However, our target for our pilot launch would be to test it out among at least 500 farmers in Makawanpur District.

With Solve, we hope to continue developing our business model, onboard investors, and have mentorship to implement our solution and measure our impact.

We have been able to develop the project until this stage while we were in school, and now we want to bring this idea further beyond our time at MIT and Harvard. We believe that this idea could be more impactful

We need support by building more viable product for testing out and we need to get feedback, and funding during the process to bring designer and engineer on board. 

Although there are three of us in the team and we have diverse background, there are some things that we need to fill the gap for expertise that we are still lacking at. Through MIT Solve, we want to be guided by someone who has been this process and need guidance from them to understand more instruction.

Our solution is innovative in several key ways. First, it digitizes the agri-goods supply chain system in Nepal, creating a more streamlined and efficient system for small and medium-sized farmers to sell their crops and access credit. By using a mobile platform, we are able to connect farmers with buyers and financial institutions in a way that is faster and more transparent than traditional methods.

Second, our solution helps build creditworthiness for small and medium-sized farmers. One of the key challenges that these farmers face is access to credit, which can be critical for investing in their farms and improving their yields. By digitizing the supply chain system and creating a more transparent and traceable process for buying and selling crops, we are able to generate data that can be used to assess farmers' creditworthiness. This can help them access the financing they need to invest in their farms and grow their businesses.

Finally, our solution improves network efficiency by creating a more connected and integrated supply chain system. By using a mobile platform to connect farmers, buyers, and financial institutions, we are able to reduce inefficiencies in the supply chain, such as long wait times or delays in payment. This can help ensure that farmers receive fair prices for their crops and that buyers receive high-quality products in a timely manner.

Overall, we believe that our solution has the potential to revolutionize the agri-goods supply chain system in Nepal, improving efficiency, transparency, and access to credit for small and medium-sized farmers. By leveraging technology and innovation, we hope to create a more sustainable and equitable agricultural system that benefits farmers, buyers, and the broader community.

Our impact goals are to improve the livelihoods of small and medium-sized farmers in Nepal by increasing their access to credit and improving the efficiency and transparency of the agri-goods supply chain system. Specifically, our impact goals for the next year and the next five years are:

Next year:

• Onboard at least 500 small and medium-sized farmers onto our platform
• Partner with micro finance institutions in Makawanpur (for our pilot area) to provide credit to farmers
• Explore opportunities with existing digital wallet e-Sewa
• Increase the income of participating farmers by at least 20%

Next five years:

• Onboard at least 10,000 small and medium-sized farmers onto our platform
• Scale the project to all 7 provinces in Nepal
• Partner with major commercial banks, digital banks, and digital wallets, apart from local micro finances institution to provide credit to farmers
• Increase the income of participating farmers by at least 50%
• Expand our platform to other regions in Nepal, reaching at least 50% of small and medium-sized farmers in the country

To achieve these impact goals, we plan to:

• Develop partnerships with key stakeholders in the agri-goods supply chain system, including financial institutions, buyers, and government agencies
• Leverage data analytics and machine learning algorithms to assess farmers' creditworthiness and provide customized financial products and services
• Offer training and education programs to farmers to improve their agricultural practices and increase their yields
• Continuously monitor and evaluate our impact, making adjustments as necessary to ensure that we are achieving our goals and creating meaningful change for farmers in Nepal.

Overall, we believe that our solution has the potential to transform the lives of small and medium-sized farmers in Nepal by improving their access to credit and creating a more efficient and transparent supply chain system. By setting clear impact goals and working closely with stakeholders, we hope to achieve our vision of a more equitable and sustainable agricultural system in Nepal.

We are using a variety of indicators to measure our progress toward our impact goals. These include:

1. Number of farmers onboarded onto our platform - this indicator will help us track our progress toward our goal of onboarding at least 500 small and medium-sized farmers onto our platform in the next year, and at least 10,000 farmers in the next five years.

2. Volume of agri-goods sold through our platform - this indicator will help us track the growth and scalability of our solution, as well as our progress toward increasing the income of participating farmers.

3. Number of financial institutions partnered with - this indicator will help us track our progress toward our goal of partnering with at least 5 financial institutions in the next year, and at least 20 institutions in the next five years.

4. Increase in farmers' income - we plan to conduct surveys and interviews with participating farmers to track the increase in their income as a result of using our platform.

5. Reduction in supply chain inefficiencies - we plan to track the time it takes for farmers to sell their crops and receive payment, as well as the percentage of crops that are rejected due to quality issues. These indicators will help us track our progress toward creating a more efficient and transparent supply chain system.

In addition, we plan to align our impact goals with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically SDG 1 (No Poverty), SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), SDG 10 (Reduce Inequalities), SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), and SDG 13 (Climate Action).We will use the relevant indicators associated with these goals to help us track our progress and communicate our impact to stakeholders. By measuring our progress using these indicators, we hope to continuously improve and refine our solution to create maximum impact for small and medium-sized farmers in Nepal.

Our theory of change is based on the following logic:

1. The current agri-goods supply chain system in Nepal is inefficient, opaque, and excludes many small and medium-sized farmers from accessing credit and fair prices for their crops.

2. Our mobile platform digitizes the supply chain system, making it more transparent, efficient, and accessible to small and medium-sized farmers.

3. By using our platform, farmers are able to build a credit history, which increases their creditworthiness and enables them to access loans and other financial services that were previously unavailable to them.

4. Farmers also benefit from increased bargaining power, as they are able to connect directly with buyers and negotiate fair prices for their crops.

5. As farmers' income increases and they become more integrated into the formal financial system, they are better able to invest in their farms and households, leading to improved livelihoods and increased food security.

6. Over time, the increased efficiency and transparency of the supply chain system will also benefit buyers and other actors in the system, leading to broader positive impacts on the agri-goods sector in Nepal.

We believe that by addressing the key challenges of access to credit and network inefficiencies, our solution has the potential to transform the lives of small and medium-sized farmers in Nepal, catalyze positive impacts throughout the supply chain system, and contribute to broader efforts to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Our solution leverages a mobile platform that enables small and medium-sized farmers in Nepal to digitize their transactions, build credit history, and connect with buyers in the agri-goods supply chain system. The platform uses a combination of SMS and mobile app technology to enable farmers to track their transactions, receive payments, and access credit and other financial services.

The core technology behind our solution is a cloud-based platform that aggregates data from multiple sources, including farmers, buyers, financial institutions, and other actors in the supply chain system. This data is then analyzed using machine learning algorithms to identify patterns and trends, which can inform decision-making and improve the efficiency of the supply chain system.

Overall, our technology enables small and medium-sized farmers in Nepal to access financial services and fair prices for their crops, while also improving the efficiency and transparency of the agri-goods supply chain system.

1. Building a diverse team: by prioritizing to recruit a diverse team that reflects the communities we are serving. This can include recruiting from underrepresented groups, providing equal opportunities for all candidates, and ensuring that the hiring process is free from bias.

2. Creating an inclusive culture: We want to create a culture where everyone feels welcome, respected, and valued. This can include providing training on unconscious bias, fostering open communication, and creating opportunities for everyone to participate and contribute.

3. Prioritizing equity: We aim to prioritize equity by ensuring that everyone has equal access to opportunities and resources, regardless of their background or identity. This can include implementing policies and practices that address systemic barriers, such as unequal pay, and creating opportunities for professional development and advancement. We aim to create an app that provides multiple language options for diverse languages in Nepal to select from.

4. Engaging with diverse communities: We want to engage with diverse farmers communities from different villages to better understand their needs and perspectives, and to ensure that their solutions are relevant and effective. This can include building partnerships with community-based organizations in a region or area and involving diverse stakeholders in the design and implementation of solutions. We understand that even though these farmers are located in the Nepal region, due to geographical characteristics, they might have different needs.

We are still exploring it. Currently, we are thinking that our business model is by the economic of scale, e.g., pay per use or pay per transaction because this could be more useful and sustainable.

For the first few years, the platform would be free for farmers. We would like to sustain financing the platform through grants. We need more guidance on this.

As the platform grows and is deemed beneficial by farmers, we shall introduce a minimum percentage fee per transaction or is subscription model at a minimum cost for farmers.

Our main goal is to have this network effect. If we have more farmers, we will attract more buyers.

Our revenue model could potentially come from grants, transaction fee, and other charges associated with our digital platform. When the platform grows, we will also explore partnerships with fertilizers company, seeds company, technical equipment company, financial institutions, and other key players in the agri-goods and agriculture industry. However, we are still unsure about it and would need more guidance.

We are currently still at the prototyping stage and a VC company in Nepal has shown interest to fund our prototype development on this project.