Colombia, Uganda & Indonesia
Fairtrade International
Funder: USAID
Funding Mechanism: LASER (Long-term Assistance and Services for Research) PULSE (Partners for University-Led Solutions Engine)
Funder: Australia Direct Aid Program (Ghana)
Coffee
14 months
Coffee Farmers
Farm Management App
There are 1.7 million Fairtrade farmers globally
In order to build entrepreneurial skills of farmers, it is fundamental to help them understand their basic farm economics.
To enable farmers to run their farms as a small-scale business, they need appropriate tools to record and analyse their expenditures and incomes. Keeping records of farm expenses and revenues will increase farmers’ understanding of actual productivity, production costs and farm incomes, in order to take better farm management decisions.
In addition, monitoring actual farmers’ incomes is crucial for measuring progress to close the gap to living incomes and identify the main drivers to improve the incomes of smallholder families. Accurate data on farm expenditures and incomes are currently missing. Aggregated farm records, feeding into a database, will enable income monitoring as a critical metric for sustainable livelihoods.
The objective of the project was to develop a functional digital application allowing smallholder farmers to track their farm revenues, labour occupation and expenditures and analyse productivity and profitability of their farm crops as well as the return on labour investment. Features include:
The goal of discovery phase is to understand the needs of farmers and teams in all implementing countries, availability of data, information and resources, as well as current operations and procedures (similarities and differences) in all four locations. This information is used to deliver technical requirements for the app development.
During App development, our Program Team was in charge of prototyping and field testing, as well as developing manuals, training materials, and reports. Iterative field testing with farmers is conducted during this phase in selected countries.
AgUnity’s Program Team delivered a training module and conducted training via video-conference and product testing in the field during. AgUnity also integrated the app with other Fairtrade digital platforms and provided one month of post-production services, including bug fixing and training.
AgUnity started by conducting meetings with country partners to establish process maps, key stakeholders, product users and other supply chain information. Site visits were undertaken to identify any context specific issues.
During development phase AgUnity set up a cloud-platform secured in Blockchain, loaded relevant updates to the AgUnity App and assigned a device to each actor in the supply chain. Training manuals for the products were developed and distributed during this phase.
Where required, assistance was provided to farmers and processors in the process of finding buyers, communicating supply chain and quality assurance improvements, which in turn returned higher prices for the commodity.
