Digital Green was founded on the belief that technology can accelerate efforts to end poverty. Since then, our technology-enabled approach has reached over 2 million small and marginal farmers in India. And we’re just getting started.
Training frontline workers: Frontline workers who screen the videos in their communities arecrucial to our success. Since 2012, we have partnered with the Government of India’s National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM) and its state-level counterparts to train over 12,500 frontline workers to use our approach for promotion of sustainable agriculture & nutrition practices in over 15,200 villages across India.
Connecting farmers to markets: Each week, smallholder farmers in India spend as much as a full day selling their produce at the nearest market, incurring especially high opportunity and transport costs when their produce volumes are low. To reduce those costs, Digital Green enables farmers to more efficiently access markets through digital solutions it creates with their feedback.
Improving health outcomes: In an effort to address the holistic needs of rural communities, we address maternal, new-bornand child health with a focus on family planning, hygiene and sanitation practices. The videos produced and disseminated communicate simple health practices that can lead to substantial improvements in health and nutrition among India’s rural communities.
Learning & Evaluation: We learn from everything we do. No matter whether it was a success or a failure. We listen closely –to people, and to data.Data collection, analysis and evaluation is critical to what we do. We share the quantitative and qualitative data gathered with all stakeholders, creating a community of collaborators that improves systems on an ongoing basis. We use evidence from the grassroots-level to inform and galvanize everyone involved to advance rural development.
While we started our outreach with a focus on agriculture extension, we diversified based on the feedback from the communities we worked with as well as the requirements of our partners.
We identify most impactful agricultural practices that maximize profits for farmers by partnering with researchers and practitioners and use communications technologies that are most accessible to the communities to disseminate this information, are cost effective when aiming for scale. Our approach has resulted in an increase of 24-74% yield across various commodities.
Wedrew lessons from our early projects toadapt our approachto health and nutrition messaging among rural communities who asked for it.Werevised our standard operating procedures formoreeffective implementation of health and nutrition projects, which require more nuanced content and treatment than in agriculture. Our teams also worked on improvingour in-houseData Management Systemsto capture data and analyse trends related to the healthbetter.
Our approach builds the capacity of frontline workers so they can build the capacity of others. TrainingCourseware is an essential element in the Digital Green approach since much of our work is centred on enhancing the capacities of our partners as well as the community.
Access to locally relevant, trustworthy information can help smallholder farmers leverage climate-resilient agricultural practices. Our user-oriented tech-based solutions arehelping smallholder farmers become more resilient to environmental shocks by sustainably increasing land productivity and rural livelihoods while preserving natural resources.
Ourproduce aggregation and transport service for farmers saved farmers time and money, and sent their produce into higher-value markets. We’ve been re-imagining and re-inventing the concept to help farmer led producer organizationssupport their collectivization and connect to buyers of environmentally sustainable produce.
Gender responsive programming is key to the success of our projects.Women comprise nearly 90% of our beneficiaries across the agriculture and health projects.In developing countries women contribute up to 80percent in food production by way of rearing poultry, livestock as well as growing crops. And they are also are the prime drivers of health indices such as maternal and infant mortality and hold the key to ensuring health, hygiene and nutrition security of the family.