A lightweight web application allows users to plot the locations of their local farmer groups and farms on a map of the area easily and quickly.
The application is an invaluable tool to help key stakeholders delivers their services into the hands of farmers more effectively.
According to Syngenta, over 2.5 billion people depend on agriculture for their livelihoods and the smallholder farmers are critical to the world’s food security, yet they often face high financial risks and low returns.
Every day, 180,000 people leave rural communities to live in cities. Ensuring that farming is a viable and attractive occupation will help to create vibrant, productive rural communities.
In response to this, Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), an international development charity that fights poverty through the lasting power of volunteering, in partnership with Syngenta, Bank Asia and Department for International Development (DFID) is supporting 100,000 farming households to increase yields, income, and create thriving agricultural communities by 2020 through the development of a self-financing social business.
The project helped to provide rural farmers with better access to modern agricultural services and products, made available through Farmer Centres. These are owned and operated by local agri-entrepreneurs, who use the centres as a base from which to work with local farmers.
Growing Together project involved almost 1,500 different volunteers – including corporate, national, international, community and youth volunteers. This adaptive way of working and collaborating enables to collate many different viewpoints and embed change in the communities.
Recently, Equal Experts sent technical experts to VSO Bangladesh to Growing Together project with the goal of helping to increase access to the Farmer Centres. It was part of an ambitious drive to grow from helping just 7,000 farmers to some 100,000.
Equal Experts Engagement Manager Matt McGuire said: “I also had the chance to work on a very different project, in Bangladesh – where a small team of Equal Experts consultants worked with VSO International to help bring modern agricultural services to rural farmers. This was a delivery environment quite unlike any I’ve worked with before.”
VSO’s Private Sector Partnership team member Chris Borthwick provides some quick context including shaping idea, growing together, getting to work and mapping activities.
“Over the last year or two, I’ve increasingly wanted to explore how I can apply the delivery skills I’ve picked up in my career to do some good out there in the wider world. While researching this I came across the VSO’s corporate volunteering scheme,” Chris said.
VSO is making great progress in Bangladesh over the last few years. Working with Syngenta and BankAsia, it has helped to provide rural farmers with better access to modern agricultural services and products, made available through Farmer Centres.
The scheme had got off to a good start, albeit with a problem attached – not enough farmers were benefiting from it. When VSO first told us about the situation, each Farmer Centre was only working with about 10 percent local farmers they could be reaching.
As with our more typical work, the key to solving the problem was talking to the people involved, and much of our time was spent with locals learning about life on the ground. Overall, we collected 220 responses to our survey, of which only 12 were digital, explained Chris.
Using the data we gathered, the activists created a lightweight web application using React and Node.js. It allows users to easily and quickly plot the locations of their local Farmer Groups and farms on a map of the area. The location data is then stored in an Amazon DocumentDB cluster for persistence.
Over time, this will create a detailed visualisation of farmers in the area, and their proximity to Farm Centres:
Early reception for this has proved to be remarkably positive. Our stakeholders are thrilled that they can now see information at a glance that would previously require trawling through massive Excel sheets.
In the villages, farmers were excited to have their information online, and feel like their needs are being catered for.
Presenting the data in this easy-to-use way is already having further ramifications, too. Strategic decisions are so much easier to make with the information at people’s fingertips, and new Farmer Centres are in the early stages of planning, while those that already exist are now preparing to take on more Agri-entrepreneurs to meet rising demands for their services.
written by ZAM Khairuzzaman is with Daily Sun