Start-ups ring the changes in farming phone-tech

本文由CASA programme。

Demand for phone-based agricultural services has shot up almost 60 per cent across Asia and Africa this year, but many services struggle to raise the funds to survive longer than a couple of years.

这意味着小规模的农民无法获得急需的服务和信息，同时有希望的中小型农业综合企业在蓬勃发展之前就失败了。

‘Bundled services’ have the greatest potential for impact, in terms of business growth and wider economic development, according to a九月报告来自小型持有人和农业综合企业（CASA）beplay下载官网西西软件计划的商业农业计划。

捆绑服务 - 包含在包装中的多个服务，对于客户来说通常比​​单独订阅服务便宜 - 可用于跟踪付款，生产力和员工物流，同时还将小农与市场联系起来。

“我们不得不从出口商到现在销售软件以及托管，员工和法律影响。It took us two to three years to get it right.”

Almut van Casteren, eProd Solutions

“The more complex a service is, the more impactful it can be because it’s addressing financial, information and market access constraints that have benefits on an agribusiness level and a farmer level,” says report author Alvaro Valverde, a relationship manager at CASA.

“At the same time, they are increasing the likelihood of generating revenue because some of those stakeholders will start paying and supporting the sustainability of the service.”

Attracting paid subscribers is vital, says Valverde, as services that use donor funding to get off the ground strive to become financially sustainable.

Service success

肯尼亚eProd Solutionsis a supplier management service that provides farmer profiles, field activity monitoring, financial transactions, training and more.

联合创始人Almut Van Casteren说：“我们为自己开发了这个全面的平台，并认为它仅与我们的辣椒业务有关。”当当地的非营利组织看到该技术时，该服务的潜力得到了认可。

“They introduced us to their agribusiness partners, who would become our first clients,” says van Casteren. But, there were challenges along the way.

“我们不得不从出口商到现在销售软件以及托管，员工和法律影响。我们花了两到三年的时间才使它正确。”她说。

Now, eProd is self-funded, is available in 14 countries and in nine languages. “We are offering new services and evolving, but from day one the business model was focused on a commercially suitable product,” says van Casteren.

Failure rate

Services targeted to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are on the rise, but they also have a high failure rate, says Valverde, who works for CASA project partner CABI,scidev.net’s母体组织。

“Services that have SMEs as their clients can increase investibility while also having an impact on the smallholder farmer,” he says. “We wanted to identify key pieces of success for developing these services by looking through a business lens and not just a developmental angle.”

Business-to-business services were most likely to succeed, with 61 per cent of those with more than 250,000 users adopting this model.

“These are services that charge the agribusinesses and are free for the smallholder farmer, or are combining both and often charging farmers a small fee for financial transactions,” says Valverde.

他说，至关重要的是，这意味着依靠捐助者资金或补贴而转移。

变相

Paul Voutier, director of knowledge and innovation at种植亚洲，东南亚可持续农业解决方案的孵化器说，越来越多的捐助者资助的服beplay下载官网西西软件务是“变相”的开发项目。

Voutier说：“因此，服务不是在考虑如何为客户服务，而是如何为农民服务。”“他们没有建立需求驱动的商业模式，他们的激励措施都是错误的。”

他说：“捐助者的角色促进了信息流，网络和人们不坐在孤岛周围时进行的指数学习。”

但是，仍然有明显的获得这些农业服务的差距。在大多数小农户是妇女的撒哈拉以南非洲，只有四分之一的女性农民可以使用这些技术服务。

“There are still issues around mobile ownership, where women don’t access phones and don’t own phones,” says Valverde.

Social and economic development has been shown to acceleratewhen women have access to mobile phones，，，，according to the UN’s ‘Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals’ 2020 report says.

“[Information and communications technologies] aren’t a silver bullet for development, but they really can help address some of the constraints that smallholder farmers and agribusinesses face,” Valverde says.

CASA计划（针对小农和农业综合企业的商业农业）旨在增加对农业beplay下载官网西西软件综合企业的全球投资，而农业综合企业与小农在公平的商业关系中进行贸易，从而增加了小农的收入和气候韧性。访问www.casaprogramme.comforinformation and resources。