Earlier this year EE partnered with VSO to help farmers in rural Bangladesh. This is the story of how we went from inception to production in four weeks and the challenges of developing software half the world away from home

1. Growing Together
Software development in the developing world
Patrick Birchall
Platform Engineer

2. ● 20+ years of tricking
computers into working.
● 6 years doing so
professionally.
● Other skills including but
not limited to:
○ Music
○ Nope, just music.
Expectation
Reality

3. Background
● Equal Experts reached out
to VSO in early 2018.
● Growing Together was
selected for the
information challenges it
presented.
● Volunteers were selected
and began preparing to
travel in late 2018.

4. VSO Knowledge Exchange
● Knowledge Exchange is VSO’s corporate volunteering
program.
● Pairs expert practitioners with challenges they may not see
day-to-day.
● Partners provide expertise to VSO and their projects free
of charge.

5. Growing Together
● Founded in 2014 as a joint venture between VSO and
Syngenta.
● Initially aimed to improve the livelihoods of 10,000
farmers.
○ Hoping to engage with 30,000 farmers by the end of
2019.

6. Growing Together Structure
● Joikko, a for-profit social enterprise that
owns the Farmer Centre franchise.
● Farmer Centres, ran by a single
entrepreneur who brings together
financial, educational and technical
services.
● Agri-Entrepreneurs, members of the
community who work with the Farm
Centres to take the services out into the
community.
● Farmer Groups, communities of farmers
working together.

7. The Challenges
● Low quality data
○ Incomplete entries
○ Errors in transliteration, e.g.
Horekrisnopur/Horekrishnopur.
● Data stored in a single 30k+ line Excel document.
○ Difficult to navigate.
○ Challenging to keep distributed copies in sync.

8. The Challenges
● Local infrastructure is less than ideal
○ Many families in this area lack an internationally
recognised address.
● Very few people have access to a smart device or the
internet.

9. The Solution - Objectives
● Allow new data to be
added with ease.
● Always be up to date.
● Show information ‘at a
glance’.

11. Inception to Production in three
weeks
-or-
How to exploit time differences
to work 17 hour days

12. The importance of planning
● Tickets outline everything that needs doing.
● Columns track the state of tickets.
● Allows everyone to keep up to date with progress.

13. The Solution - Application
● Node.JS
○ React-google-maps
○ Mongoose
○ Express
● MongoDB
○ NoSQL Document Store

14. Sample Code

15. The Solution - Infrastructure

16. Sample Code

17. Ta-da!

18. Initial Feedback
● Joikko are now able to decide locations for new
Farm Centres more easily.
● Farm Centres can accurately forecast the
required number of Agri-Entrepreneurs.
● Agri-Entrepreneurs can see their assigned
Farmer Groups and receive navigational
assistance from Google Maps.

19. But wait, there’s more...

20. What’s next?
● VSO are huge fans of our approach to
engagements and are keen for many more
teams to participate in knowledge exchange.
● Interest from other organisations in the
development sector such as DFID.

21. Q&A

22. Thank YouThank You
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