Preliminary investigation into the development of an electronic forage budget and land condition application, for use on existing hand-held devices, for the northern grazing industry

Within this project Agri-Science Queensland (DAF) and Meat and Livestock Australia conducted a preliminary investigation into the viability, likely uptake and benefits of developing an ‘app’ (a software application hosted on a smart phone) to assist northern Australian graziers with their land condition monitoring and forage budgeting. Undertaking regular land condition assessments and forage budgets to match pasture supply to animal demand is considered part of best-practice management for graziers in northern Australia. Undertaking these management tasks, however, is often complex and requires a number of steps, both in the paddock and the office along with supporting tools and learnt skills to reach the end points; “what is the current condition of my pastures” and “how long will this feed last given the stock in the paddock”. A specifically designed app for a smart phone or tablet was proposed as a potential solution to increase the adoption of these management practices amongst graziers. Three tasks were undertaken concurrently as part of the investigation; a review of literature, a survey of graziers and advisors in northern Australia, and consultation with software developers to scope the technical feasibility of developing the proposed app. The review of literature considered the evolution of hand-held decision support tools, a comparison of operating platforms and ‘smart’ devices for the task, and currently available agricultural apps and their uptake. A survey of northern Australian graziers and advisors sought views from industry what would be the likely benefit and uptake of this proposed app. The survey found that 76% of respondents thought this 'app' would be either useful or very useful for the grazing industry generally. Around 74% and 73% of respondents respectively said the app would increase the number or frequency of forage budgets and land condition assessments undertaken. Approximately 80% of respondents said the app would help them get started on forage budgeting and land condition assessments if they did not currently undertake these practices already. There are no technical constraints to developing the desired app and development costs were investigated. If development of an app proceeds, it will be important to provide a strong extension framework to support its piloting and promotion

The Digitalisation of African Agriculture Report 2018-2019

An inclusive, digitally-enabled agricultural transformation could help achieve meaningful livelihood improvements for Africa’s smallholder farmers and pastoralists. It could drive greater engagement in agriculture from women and youth and create employment opportunities along the value chain. At CTA we staked a claim on this power of digitalisation to more systematically transform agriculture early on. Digitalisation, focusing on not individual ICTs but the application of these technologies to entire value chains, is a theme that cuts across all of our work. In youth entrepreneurship, we are fostering a new breed of young ICT ‘agripreneurs’. In climate-smart agriculture multiple projects provide information that can help towards building resilience for smallholder farmers. And in women empowerment we are supporting digital platforms to drive greater inclusion for women entrepreneurs in agricultural value chains

ICT Update 69: Engaging with communities through crowdsourcing

ICT Update is a bimonthly printed and on-line magazine (http://ictupdate.cta.int) and an accompanying e-mail newsletter published by CTA. This issue focuses on crowd sourcing

Participatory Assessment and Adaptation for Resilience to Climate Change

Traditional monitoring and evaluation tools are often costly and are not well placed to assess complex, multi-dimensional dynamic livelihood attributes, such as resilience. While these approaches may be accurate in measurement, they often fail to empower respondents to take action. Drawbacks of other participatory resilience approaches include a requirement for a large amount of information, significant time required to administer surveys, and data analysis burdens (Schipper and Langston 2015, 19; COP 2016). They also need a baseline and an end line to assess change. They typically fail to capture how farmers actively address specific shocks and stresses or what lessons can be learned. Given these limitations, an opportunity exists to review alternative approaches and develop different tools. Our approach and tool, farmbetter, attempts to build on lessons learned from developing and implementing these tools. Rather than characterizing the user as lacking agency in a challenging environment, farmbetter helps users make conscious decisions to adapt and withstand specific shocks and stresses such as floods, drought, or conflict, which can require contradictory coping strategies. We aim to then further connect farmers whose properties have similar agro-ecological conditions and challenges to better facilitate knowledge-sharing between food producers, ultimately improving learning and resilience. This allows for the connection of big data with (traditional) knowledge and competences already being used by farmers to improve resilience. This is enabled by advances in technology (e.g. mobile phone availability), which offer new opportunities to more easily and cheaply collect data as well as giving access to marginalized groups’ views and knowledge (e.g. Raghavan et al. 2016)

Dynamic Capabilities in Microfinance Innovation: A Case Study of The Grameen Foundation

Dynamic Capabilities in Microfinance Innovation: A Case Study of The Grameen Foundation by Sarah Elizabeth Kayongo May 2020 Chair: Lars Mathiassen Major Academic Unit: Executive Doctorate in Business The purpose of this research is to understand how microfinance organizations innovate their products, services, and processes to improve financial inclusion. The research approach used is a retrospective, longitudinal, qualitative case study (Yin, 2014) of how Grameen Foundation, a global non-government organization that partners with various microfinance institutions to provide micro loans, savings, and other financial and professional services innovated. Applying Dynamic Capability Theory (Teece, 1997, 2012 & 2014) highlighted the unique ways in which Grameen Foundation innovated its products, services, and processes through the three concepts of (1) sensing, (2) seizing, and (3) transforming. We conducted a total of twelve semi-structured interviews with staff and supplemented the interviews with publicly available materials, impact reports, press releases, trade journal articles, and website information. Our findings provide a detailed empirical process account of how Grameen Foundation has consistently been a leader at creating financial linkages through innovating its various programs and the activities within those programs over a ten-year period 2009 – 2019. We found the usefulness of Dynamic Capabilities Theory concepts of sensing, seizing and transforming applicable to studies of innovation in microfinance in the non-government sector; however, our analysis revealed elements of the theory’s core concepts that were not directly applicable. For instance, rather than create Valuable Rare Imperfectly Imitable and Non-substitutable resources, Grameen’s philosophy of creating open-sourced market-based solutions that they shared with industry resulted in “Valuable,” “Rare,” “Diffusible,” and “Non-substitutable” resources that were “transferrable” and “imitable”, hence we concluded that in the context of innovating in non-government microfinance organizations, this concept translated into Transferrable, Valuable, Imitable and Non-substitutable or “TVIN” resources. We offer a resource guide to microfinance institutions, non-government organizations, and governments of five insights that characterized how Grameen Foundation innovated its products services and processes to improve financial inclusion based on: 1) Sensing country-specific needs; 2) Seizing opportunities to use existing technology; 3) Funding projects that drove innovation overtime and creating financial linkages through multi-sectorial partnerships; 4) Adopting a business model that enabled innovation transfer to attain transformative scale; and 5) Strengthening the internal capabilities of how performance was measured, monitored and evaluated for program outputs in order to sustain the scaling of outcomes. Single case studies tend to suffer from limited generalizability, but details of this study will benefit microfinance practitioners in assessing the transferability of our findings to other contexts (Lincoln and Guba, 1985). We emphasize that in complex and ever-changing economic environments, it\u27s increasingly harder to predict the effects that unforeseeable circumstances such as health pandemics would have on global financial markets. We recognize that such changes are likely to produce different outcomes for innovation in microfinance organizations and their beneficiaries. Future studies will benefit from applying experimental design methods and theories that focus on innovation with inbuilt resiliency and capabilities to withstand such extreme but unforeseeable circumstances. Still, we provided a detailed empirical analysis of how a global microfinancing organization consistently innovated its products, services, and processes through four programs and twenty activities overtime, and across countries at an in-depth level that few studies have done. Lastly, we have demonstrated that Dynamic Capabilities Theory is very adaptable to studies of innovation in microfinance