Growing up, I was inspired by astronauts,
uh, and I've looked at old 60s era footage
of astronauts walking on the surface of the
moon, and their unique combination of brains
and brawn inspired me to study computer science
and aerospace engineering and get a pilot
license.
And seek to get into the space program.
As I was trying to make that journey, I went
to look at some of these biographies of these
astronauts and oftentimes many of them who
got to space would see the world from a new
perspective
- and wonder: Why is there war?
Why is there poverty?
And come back to the back to ground and try
to reconnect with the world and its people.
I didn't go all the way, uh, but uh, I ended
up shifting course and landed up in rural
India with a very different sort of hero:
The Indian small-scale farmer, uh, who typically
cultivates less than two acres worth of land
and earns less than one to two dollars a day.
But yet, represents the second highest farm
output in the world, um, for India overall.
The work of Digital Green began in 2006, initially
as part of Microsoft research, in a group
looking at technology for emerging markets
that Nithya also is a part to .
And at the time, we were looking at what are
the ways that technology could connect these
rural communities with various types of expert
services.
At the time, one of the first MIT, uh, projects
that was deploying computers and Internet
connectivity from 2006 was taking place, and
what they found though was that although these
computers and connectivity were being deployed
they were running into all sorts of challenges
from Access, uh, as well as, uh, accessibility
to - of local languages, to the whole gamut
of rule development challenges, ranging from
uh, lack of electricity to road access, to
market access, which made it the case that
even though we were sitting at Microsoft
- and we were thinking about: What is the
role of technology?
We couldn't just focus on the technology piece
alone.
We needed to think about these issues of rural
development in a much more comprehensive manner.
Now, many organizations - especially the Government,
as well as civil society and even the private
sector - have tried to address this challenge
of: How do you get expert information to farmers,
to boost their productivity and increase their
nutrition and quality of life?
- by essentially building armies of frontline
workers community health workers, community
agricultural extension workers who are tasked
with traversing difficult-to-cross terrain
and diverse farmers of varying language and
agro-ecological and and other persuasions
- to be able to convince them to adopt new
types of technologies or practices on their
own farms?
The Government of India actually has one of
the highest, uh, largest extension forces
in the world with over 200,000 extension agents.
But the Government of India's own survey in
2005 found that the formal extension workers
were reaching a proportionately small number
of farmers.
What was the most effective way in which information
was being shared amongst these farming communities,
was the farmers, themselves, sharing information
with their neighbors and with their family
members about what crops they grew
- and how they grew them, as well as those
folks who would be selling these farmers various
types of inputs like seeds, fertilizers and
pesticides and the like.
And so, when we started this work, we thought:
Well, video might make sense in an agricultural
extension.
Now, that's not particularly novel.
The Government of India, itself, has been
running broadcast television programs for
farmers for the last 70 years.
But what's different, is with the [inaudible]
of Camcorders and people projectors - this
whole process of producing a sharing knowledge
can now be done at grassroots level and realize
some significant resource savings in terms
of human cost and time.
And where the going mantra for agricultural
extension or for the training of farmers or
improved practices is: Seeing is believing
- Video makes some sense.
Now, it's one thing to say that video makes
some sense.
It's another thing to institutionalize it
within the context of an existing grassroots
level agricultural development program.
So, for the first six months, we just spent
time immersed in these rural communities,
conducting ethnographic research and just
being with a local organization, working with
these communities and seeing really: How can
video perhaps be imbedded to support the work
that they were already doing?
So, some of the things that we looked at were:
Who should be featured in these videos?
You can get a great lecturer from a university
scientist, or from a government officer.
But, for farmers who see these videos, they
see a large socioeconomic, geographic, educational
disconnect between those individuals and themselves.
In the so-called Green Revolution era, there
was a focus on progressive farmers.
So, those farmers were richer and more risk
capable.
But what we found is that farmers wanted to
hear from similar farmers to themselves - average
and marginalized farmers and even landless
farmers uh, who were similarly resource constrained
and were trying these practices for themselves
and could inspire these other farmers to take
up these practices for themselves.
A next question is: Once you build out a library
of videos, is how do you go about distributing
it?
So, initially, uh, we tried to stream these
videos over local village cable networks.
This was in South India.
so a fair share of, uh, TV penetration and
cable access existed even back in 2006.
Uh, and we even tried NetFlix style VCD exchanges,
where people could watch videos at their own
will on their own television sets.
But very quickly we realized that farmers
would have questions about: Which video should
I watch?
What if I have need access to an input or
a market to really get value from this information
that's being shared with me?
There was also the fact that this initial
curiosity factor of say, looking at, uh, videos,
started to die out very quickly without sort
of these connections actually taking place
for farmers to get ultimate impact and value
from them.
And what we found as really important was
to have a human facilitator in the loop somebody
who could be present at the time that these
videos were being shown to these farmer groups.
And be able to engage the communities into
discussion asking questions, getting feedback
and then providing follow-up support as needed
to help these farmers translate information
into action and value.
So, over the years this work started in 2006
we produced, through our network of communities
and partners across nine countries, uh, in
South Asia and Africa - 5,000 videos in about
50 different languages.
These videos spanned a variety of different
types, uh, from demonstrations of agricultural
practices and techniques to testimonials,
uh, about how to access markets or government
schemes.
And the main feature though is really featuring
these local individuals as the stars in these
videos, to reduce that disconnect between
insiders and outsiders - in this case, the
people who watched the videos are very much
in the same communities who appear in the
videos.
And we find that some farmers are even incentivized
to adopt these practices, just to be featured
on video, to be seen as role models within
their respective communities.
The way that this content is produced - obviously
in these communities that have limited electricity
and Internet connectivity - is essentially
a hub and spoke model where in each district
where we operate, a team of four to six individuals
from the local community is trained to produce
these videos for themselves, using just basic
pocket video cameras
- story-boarding out these videos.
Using Windows Movie Maker and the like, to
be able to edit them and then distribute these
videos after they've been vetted by some technical
experts to ensure their quality, uh, in their
local area.
And so, if you're a farmer, watching these
videos, about 80 percent of the videos that
you'd be watching would be from within your
same district, and just about 20 percent of
the videos might be coming from across.
Because, we find that the biggest impact that
comes from the videos is not the technical
part about the step-by-step demonstration
of this or that practice?
But really that aspirational value that is
afforded by these videos
- where farmers are able to see their peers
benefiting from these practices, becoming
better farmers as a result, and themselves
feeling that they can, too.
Essentially changing how they even perceive
themselves and their own self-confidence in
the process.
Behind the scenes, we have a variety of different
types of technology platforms that I wanted
to just share quickly with you as we've scaled
up this approach now to about 10,000 villages
and 1.5 odd million farmers, 80 percent of
whom I should mention are women.
Uh, we have three types of technology solutions
that make this scaling possible, uh, that
I've kind of segmented into three-, three
categories: Targeting, empowering and connecting.
Targeting, you can think of as essentially
like a Google analytics, four hour videos,
in that although these videos are being screened
offline, we're collecting data at every video
screening about who watched what video, what
questions they asked and what practices they
did or did not do afterwards.
And each farmer, each of these 1.5 million
farmers is watching one new video every two
weeks, in sync with their cropping season
and the like.
And so, what we can see are trends: What's
the most popular video at a particular time
or place.
What's the least popular practice that people
may do once or perhaps drop the subsequent
season?
We've also assembled these videos.
They're all the videos are available on YouTube,
of course and then we get a, uh, a high degree
of visitor-ship online nowadays as, um, mobile
Internet access expands.
And but what we've done on our website is
basically to create a layer on top of the
YouTube uh, site, to organize these videos
based on crops, technology, language and link
in the data about how these videos were utilized.
How many people watched them, on and offline?
How many people adopted these practices, ultimately?
And what were the quality of questions that
people asked, which might inform, uh, a new
video based on frequently asked questions,
for instance
As as access has been expanding, we've also
been pushing on trying to enable the communities
themselves to self-service themselves and
watch these videos at their own volition.
So, with colleagues and Microsoft research,
we developed an app that is a - which tries
to minimize text and is a uh, basically a
text-free user interface for, uh, enabling,
um, rural communities to search and browse
through this video content based on pictorial
representations of video content, as well
as audio cues that they can sort of browse
through.
And given like the limitations of connectivity,
we also had ways so that people don't have
to stream necessarily the whole video but
can just watch, for instance, the key frames
of the content that might be of use to them.
Alongside that we have a leader board of the
farmers that we work with.
As I mentioned, we have all this data that
we collect and are able to do a Google analytics
type of play of looking at trends of what's
popular and what's not.
We also are able to create leader boards of
the farmers, themselves, to see which farmers
are adopting more or less of these practices
and how does that compare with their peers?
And how about, how did the community agricultural
and health workers that work with them, how
are they performing and who's doing better
or worse than their peers?
To kind of expose this often black box of
rural development online and so that you can
see, you know, who is
who is interacting with - with whom, and perhaps
bridge these communities who are sometimes
even disconnected with - with themselves.
So, we built out a tool called Farmerbook,
which is basically a Facebook of the farmers
that we work with, where you can see a timeline
activity feed of say, this one individual
woman over the course of time about what videos
she watched, what practices she applied or
didn't apply �
And what questions did she ask?
And how did that compare with her peers?
As a way to bring these women together, to
share best practices with one another and
ask: Why did one woman, perhaps, adopt a practice
and one didn't?
Is there an opportunity for exchange there?
We've also linked that Farmerbook, uh, sort
of timeline, to Facebook, itself, so that
people who are online mostly urban and middle-class,
uh, types of folks uh, so that they can bridge
this world-, these two worlds that are often
and increasingly disconnected of the rural
communities, um, and and the online urban
communities.
And here you can, for instance, follow an
individual, uh, uh, farmer and her progress
over time.
We've gone further to try to put an entertainment
spin onto this by creating a Facebook game
called, uh, Wonder Village, which is kind
of like a Farmville-esque kind of game, where
you build a virtual village economy, you play
with your Facebook friends.
But along the way, you connect with these
village gurus who turn out to be the same
farmers that we work with offline in these
rural communities.
Another attempt to-, in this direction was
a reality TV show program that we co-produced
in India with a major station there.
Um, and it was a kind of a cross between
Amazing Race meets a Apprentice - a 13-episode
series, 15 college-age contestants traveling
across India by bus, doing challenges, like
setting a-, setting up jet irrigation kits
or preparing meals with local millets.
Um, and getting kicked off each episode, until
we had finally the Green Champion.
And again, the idea was primarily targeted
toward like these urban audiences.
However, we also found spillover benefits
for the rural communities themselves, as they
started to feel that: Oh, people in Bombay
and Delhi care about agriculture?
That changes how I even see agriculture.
It no longer becomes something as the last
resort and the only thing that I see in mainstream
media is about like farmer suicides.
And there's actually something perhaps, you
know, maybe there's a source of prosperity
in this vocation, as well.
As, in addition to empowering, we've also
found that as we've been growing out this
network of farmers who are connected through
these various types of digital media, that
there's also opportunities to provide additional
value.
So, uh, about, uh, two years ago, we started
up a service called Loop, which is basically
a shared transport to market service.
Uh, it's essentially like a Uber carpool for
vegetable produce, where farmers can make
pickup requests for their perishable horticulture
produce on any given day.
We batched whose requests for pickups against
a roster of nearby transporters of varying
carrying capacity, and route them, to make
these pickups, deliver that produce to nearby
wholesale market and pay these farmers back,
um, on the same day, uh, now increasingly
through digital money, as some of this expands
in its penetration.
As a - so just to kind of conclude, we think
of our work as sort of a staff intervention,
right?
There's the farmers, themselves.
They have their informal social networks that
they've already have and which they already
used to exchange information with one another.
Then we partner with organizations - government,
civil, society, private uh, entities - who
have these field forces for organized community
groups, women's self-help groups and other
types of institutions.
And who have those frontline workers that
really have that regularity of interaction,
which is so key for trust.
Um, and then we introduce the digital tools
of information sharing, in the form of videos,
uh, as well as collecting data and feedback
from these communities, to inform and target
those programs more efficiently.
And as we do so, we then find new opportunities
to leverage that stack to sometimes connect
with other types of audience groups, whether
they be urban, middle-class, connected types
of folks, or to link these, uh, rural communities
to markets, which in a previous era, may have
been done through formal cooperatives or producer
companies
- which you can now do, using some of this
digital tools and and shared economy types
of plays.
So, finally, you know, we sometimes think
of the - the so-called digital divide as something
that's gonna be crossed by technology alone.
But the reality is there is all these other
components - the physical infrastructure,
human capital, finance, political institutions
- that are necessary foundational blocks,
before you can bring in some component of
digital technology, whether that be video,
whether that be, you know, a transportation
service.
And that's why we found it so key to partner
with local organizations and communities who
have aligned ob-, objectives and intentions
and that's then when Technology can really
amplify the effectiveness of these programs
and broaden the participation of the communities
at the same time
in much the same way that I was inspired by
these astronauts to study science and engineering.
We can also use these digital tools then to
change how farmers can take their own one
small step toward improving their lives and
those around them.
Thank you.
[Applause]
