Information Quality Assurance is critical for agro-advisories to be perceived as trustworthy by farmers

1. Delivering high quality content –
A Critical Success Factor for Agro-advisories
Mobile Plus , Chennai, India, September 2011
Sharbendu Banerjee, CABI, India
www.cabi.org
KNOWLEDGE FOR LIFE

2. About CABI
• Established in 1910
• Not-for-profit status
• Owned by 45 member countries
• Global leader in
• infomediary services
• communication of agricultural
research for development
• scientific publishing
• agricultural development
consultancy and project delivery

3. Partnerships
Alliances Linkages

4. Transforming global knowledge
into local insights

5. Agriculture “Knowledge Landscape”

6. The Bottlenecks
Information: The information is held by dispersed and
diversified entities; e.g. academia, businesses, service
providers, farmers, governments etc; Information must
be Standardized for congruity and authenticity
Communication: “WYSINWYG” ; Information
generated for one target audience may not make sense
to other target audiences ; Information must be Re-
purposed as per the target audience
Technology: The “last-mile” is not friendly with many
“common technologies” (e.g. Internet); Technology must
be Accessible and Adoptable for the target audience

7. Farmers’ information need:
● information to make
decisions
What will grow on my soil type?
● answers to questions
What standard should my crop
meet to go to market?
● solutions to problems
An insect is damaging my crop –
what do I do?
But they are cautious and
conservative

8. Farmers want the information
they receive to be:
● Reliable and ● In local ● Affordable to
tested language access
● Updated ● Relevant to ● Easy to
● Accurate their context understand
● Compliant to ● Actionable ● Flexible
local within their delivery options
regulations capacity
Quality Customized Accessible
Our work gives us this insight

9. Mobile Agro-advisory
Our work
● Delivered through Airtel mobile network
● Over 4 million farmers in 18 states of India
have subscribed to date.
● Each farmer daily gets 5 local language voice
messages on crop protection, agronomy, animal
husbandry etc
● Further supported by a local language helpline
What CABI is doing
CABI IKSL ● Providing scientific backstopping service to the
local experts
● Developing content & Knowledge Management
● Information Quality Assurance (SOP & Audits)
● Developed Crop Health Diagnosis inference
Tools for the contact centre agents

10. Our work
Plantwise
What is Plantwise?
Plantwise is a global initiative, led by
CABI, to improve food security by
reducing crop losses.
Plantwise works by communicating
and capturing knowledge
● locally from face-to-face Q&A via a
network of plant clinics to help the
poorest farmers, documenting and
digitising the Q&A;
● internationally via a comprehensive
global knowledge bank.

11. Our work Good Seed Initiative
Identifying food security problems
and working with farmers on the
solutions
● Supported by the Swiss Agency for
Development and Cooperation
● Projects run in Bangladesh and
Uganda
● Working participatively with women
farmers
● Local knowledge and technologies
integrated with new science to
empower women to improve seed
quality

12. Direct2Farm
● Knowledge delivery through
mobile/land- phones
● Farmer friendly Mobile Apps
● Single-window access (portal) for
agriculture information; aggregated
from various sources
● Validated and re-purposed by experts
● High quality, actionable information
● Real time information exchange and
analytics

13. Creating an effective content system
for impactful Agro-advisory services
Content features: Content management:
● Authoritative ● Standard Metadata
● Accurate ● Quality control workflows
● Quality controlled ● Interoperable
● Relevant
● Regularly updated
Delivery System features:
● Locally relevant
● Scalable
● Replicable
● Transferable
● Cost-effective
How will Agro-advisory services deliver this?

14. Partnerships, alliances
and linkages for creating impactful
Agro-advisory services
Partners Alliances Linkages
Content delivery Content Service & product
management delivery
• MNO-s • Infomediaries • Agro-service
• MVASP-s • Agriculture providers
• Rural Service Universities • NGO-s
Providers (IKSL) • NARS (e.g. ICAR) • Markets
• Apps Developers • Agriculture Centres of • Government
Excellence extension services
...and “commitment to quality” brings all together

15. Information Quality Assurance;
for Trustworthiness
• Real-time
• Socio-
economic Feedback Aggregating •Authenticity
impact of sources
•Validated
• Updated
•Actionable
• Holistic
• Contextualized
Generic
Customised
Disseminating Warehousing
• Metadata/Indexing
Standards
•Re-purposed
• Interoperable
• Minimum Distortion Accessing
• Multiple platforms

16. In summary
● Farmers need information, but they are sometime sceptic
● Because each farmer is operating within its unique
climatic, socio-economic and demographic environment,
hence one solution does not fit all
● There is a lack of “trust-factor” about the agro-advisory
services among farmers (specially the smallholders)
● Agro-advisory services need to deal this by providing
● Authentic & Hyper-localized information
● Taking leverage of “partnerships-alliances-linkages” for
maximizing impact and minimizing cost
● Having robust Information Quality Assurance process in
place, to win the “trust-factor”

17. Quality information is key to help the poor
farmers address food security challenges

18. Thank You
Sharbendu Banerjee
s.banerjee@cabi.org
www.cabi.org
KNOWLEDGE FOR LIFE