Week III Summary

Making E-Agriculture Work through Public Private Partnership in Asia Summary Week III discussion: March 24-28, 2008 Week III discussion focused on reviewing the key points and content identified in Weeks I and II and sought a more in-depth review of those priority areas. It also focused on where the e-Agriculture community should consider going next with PPP, and how the valuable output from this forum can be further disseminated. Content and operational issues The points discussed are categorized as follows: Win-win in PPP Striking a win-win situation is a key to make public-private partnerships work. This requires practitioners to: • Clearly spell out roles and responsibilities and address the interests of the parties involved along with their explicit commitments toward a common goal. • Understand different incentives that drive the public and the private sectors: private sector has a profit motive through adding value for and growing its customer base, which needs to be reconciled with the public sector's interest of reaching large number of the intended beneficiaries. Both can be combined to form a common vision. • Understand the roles of the parties and their core competence: the public sector generates a lot of useful information on the one hand, and the private sector could create a sustainable delivery mechanism by creating and developing the market for the information and related services, on the other. For example, in Bangladesh, the agencies under the Ministry of Agriculture such as the Department of Agriculture Marketing (DAM) or Agriculture Information Services (AIS) have latest information and are mandated to provide them to the wider public. They could partner with the privately owned tele-centers and enrich the database and the private sector can expand its service offer. (Public information, private channels of delivery) • Ensure sustainability through a long-term commitment from public sector to the provision of quality public services and willingness of the private sector to invest and share and manage the potential risks. Content development While there seems to be a lot of information lying around in the different government agencies and research institutes, there is a need for the information to be sifted, collated and digitized properly for the beneficiaries to consume. Furthermore the process of information or content development requires careful review and useful information has the following characteristics: • Specific, measurable, accurate, relevant, timely (SMART) • Need-based, not supply driven (develop only the content that is required) • Local language • Validated, authenticated by experts, credible institutions and tested with the users (check for quality and relevance). • Timely and relevant information and services through regular updates and assessments • Digitized and hosted on a website, stored on PCs, CD ROMs etc. and hard copies made available like rice production technology info of IRRI in simple fact sheets The link between information sources (government agencies, academia) and content developers needs to be institutionalized. Awareness creation There were several recommendations made on how to popularize the ICT-based services: • Use simple activation tools like awareness camps, brochures and pamphlets in local languages • On-site, hands-on demonstration of the technology (laptop, mobile phone etc.) highlighting the benefits • Build capacity of the information service providers to process information and articulate the service benefits to the target • Organize community gatherings to mobilize agriculture communities with the help of NGOs and their networks • Use locations—such as market places (rural haats) and storage facilities—where farmers congregate • Use media such as radio and theatre to convey messages • Word-of-mouth promotion through input suppliers (e.g. seed vendors) Measuring impact Some of the indicators to measure impact were suggested as follows: • Increase in awareness levels • Replication, crowding-in of the existing model • Increase in income levels • Demand for new services • Improvements in livelihoods • Increase in services usage • Benefits derived from the services Next Steps The forum suggested that the virtual discussion should be continued in the future but needs to be complemented with face-to-face interactions in different events. For instance, it was suggested that the e-agriculture community disseminate the findings of the forum in upcoming events such as: • e-Agriculture INDIA 2008 Conference - New Dehli, India, 29-31 July 2008; • Joint Conference of IAALD, AFITA and WCCA World Congress 2008, Tokyo, Japan, 24-27 August 2008. It was also suggested that the e-agriculture community form rural e-agrinetworks attached to strong grass root level organizations where conducting need assessment surveys, identifying suitable partners and priority areas will be required. This could be linked up to regional initiatives. The need for a common and comprehensive Portal/Gateway for the agricultural community was discussed. Considering the efforts needed to develop such a portal and ensure its sustainability, it was suggested that a PPP model would perhaps be the best option. The key objectives of such portal could be: • Emerge as a "One Stop" portal to meet most of the knowledge sharing and information needs of the agricultural community. • Ensure sustainability through wide coverage and allows service providers the option for revenue generation • Provide multilingual capability and options for customization to suit regional/country specific needs • Offer features that go beyond static content to assist farmers in decision making and e-commerce so that the portal is useful, popular and actively used.

Dear Manish, Thank you for the nice sum up of the III week discussions. I hope the final document reflects some of the demographics on no. of the total participants and regions and stakeholders represented etc. Also, the names of the participants may be appended along with citation of the document as it gives an authenticity and depicts the vibrant, diverse and intense nature of the forum when presented in other fora. This is only my suggestion. Thank you once again for the nice moderation and well covered depiction of the discussions with specific summaries for all the three weeks. Regards, janaki