Laura Drewett
| Organization | Esoko Networks |
|---|---|
| Organization type | Private Sector (Commercial Companies) |
| Country | Ghana |
Laura Drewett is a social entrepreneur and expert in developing and pioneering innovative business models for new technologies in emerging markets. As International Business Development Director at Esoko, Ms. Drewett manages Esoko Networks’ international sales, operations, partner deployments, and resellers. Prior to working for Esoko, Ms. Drewett founded a social enterprise known as Adapted Consulting, specializing in designing new technologies and adapting business solutions for the developing world. She has over ten years of experience deploying sustainable ICT projects in emerging markets and has designed and managed projects for a diversity of clients in Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Laura co-authored the book Wireless Networking for the Developing World and has contributed to numerous concept papers on the deployment of ICTs in developing markets. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Foreign Affairs and French Literature from the University of Virginia and a Master’s Certificate in Project Management from the George Washington University School of Business. Laura speaks English and French fluently.
This member participated in the following Forums
Forum Forum: "Using ICT to enable Agricultural Innovation Systems for smallholders" September, 2012
Question 4 (opens 26 Sept.)
Victoria,
Good question. I wish I could answer it, but the study was conducted by INRA, and I don't have access to how they performed their random sampling. However, I will be happy to provide you with a copy of the study and also to put you in touch with the project lead to give you more information.
From what I understand, the control group was in a different community from the group that was receiving market prices on their mobile phones, and members from the two groups do not know each other, nor were they part of the same association.
The important lesson that you highlight is if you are going to conduct an impact assessment, there should be certain rules established around sampling. Good points!
Feel free to follow up with me over email.
Laura
Completely agree that information and technology are just one piece of the pie . . . in any project ICTs compose approximately 5% of the solution, and the remaining 95% should be focused on deployment, in the dirt as you say.
Just to stay objective and present all the facts . . .
Unlike the study on Esoko in Ghana, this study by the University of Oxford Department of Economics estimates the benefits that Indian farmers derive from market and weather information delivered over SMS to their mobile phone by Reuters Market Light (RML), a commercial service. They conducted a controlled randomized experiment in 100 villages of Maharashtra. While some farmers who received information on their mobiles associated RML information with a number of decisions they have made, and there was some evidence that the information received affected spatial arbitrage and crop grading, the magnitude of these effects was small. The study showed there was no statistically significant average effect of the service on the price received by farmers, crop value added, crop losses resulting from rainstorms, or the likelihood of changing crop varieties and cultivation practices. In other words, this is the exact opposite of what was found in the study done on Esoko in Ghana. Check out this link to read the study: http://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/members/marcel.fafchamps/homepage/rml.pdfGathering evidence and monitoring impact is very costly and difficult to do. How can you prove that an increase in revenues has come directly from market information and not from other factors or influences? It is very hard to prove definitely, as certainly other things will come into play. You also want to make sure that an impact study is done by an outside third party, so that the results are objective.
To that end, I wanted to share some results from a study of the French National Institute for National Research (INRA) released in December 2011. INRA found that smallholder farmers in Northern Ghana saw a 10% revenue increase receiving and then utilizing Esoko SMS market prices—the first study if its kind to prove impact.
Julie Subervie, the lead of the project, announced these findings in a presentation at the Market Information Systems Conference in Bamako. In the study, 600 smallholder farmers were comprehensively surveyed on their trading behaviors over the harvest cycles of 2008 and 2009. Half of those surveyed had been receiving market prices via SMS (with the going prices in wholesale markets across the country delivered weekly to their mobile) and half had not (as a control group), so the groups could be compared. This 10% increase comes from statistics around the selling prices of three commodities—maize, groundnut and cassava.
Traditionally, isolated rural farmers simply don’t know what their goods are worth in major markets, which allows traders to come in and offer incredibly low prices to buy their harvests. Armed with price information on their mobile phones, farmers could negotiate a better deal with confidence. In some cases, farmers were timing their goods to market better, and in some limited cases larger farmers were even paying for transport to send their goods to larger markets for sale where they could make more profit.
The impact of data delivered from mobile services on the trading patterns and behaviors of smallholder farmers has not been studied widely to date, but New York University is currently conducting another evaluation to assess the impact on farmers' livelohoods in Ghana. Updates to come in the next year . . .
I will do some more research to find other impact assessments I have read from India and other places to share with the forum.
Question 3 (opens 24 Sept.)
I agree that a commercial business can do this support. Esoko does just this - we have an entire team of experts devoted to profiling, training, supporting and assisting our customers with deployment. And associations, ministries, NGOs, and agribusinesses pay us for this help to better work with their farmers. However, when you are talking about 10,000 farmers and it comes to scaling these operations, that is where the role of a community expert (who could be an ag extension officer) becomes important. We have seen that it helps to have someone that a farmer can talk to if they have a question or problem in their village.
Agreed Rachel.
At Esoko, we are a private company which ensures that we respond to the demand of our end users. If the content and technology we deliver to farmers isn't giving them the value they need, then they won't pay for the service anymore. We have to make sure that the information is accurate and provided in a format that is easy to understand. We are constantly checking with our users to make sure we are getting it right, and iterating the product and content based on their feedback. It is demand driven.
Question 2 (opens 19 Sept.)
Esoko is a private company based in Ghana and Mauritius that has built a communication medium to facilitate communication and information sharing along the agricultural value chain. Our mobile- and web-based agricultural market intelligence platform can be white-labelled for organizations to collect, manage & distribute information and for smallholder to receive targeted, relevant content directly on their phones.
We find that the some of the greatest costs to provide valuable service to end users are:
- data collection, which requires a huge amount of management to ensure it is accurate and comes at a regular frequency, and
- marketing and continual support to build awareness about the service.
In order to cover the costs, we earn revenues by:
- selling subscriptions to our platform to individuals, NGOs, agribusinesses, and government
- charging a fee on SMS
- providing consulting and training services for deployment of the technology
In order to reach smallholders directly, you typically have to have a large distribution force like a mobile telecom. But we have been more successful in getting farmers registered to get information through other organizations like businesses, associations or projects.
Ben,
What is your definition of sustainability? I think we should clarify this before giving examples.
Are you specifically looking for examples where farmers are paying for the ICT innovations?
Are you referring more to examples where donor-funded projects have developed and introduced a technology? In these situations sustainability could refer to whether this innovation is still being utilized by the target beneficiaries after the project, or it could just mean that there is a service provider in place at the end of the project that will continue to offer and support the service, or both?
Sustainability is difficult to achieve, and, once we all are on the same page about what we mean by it exactly and what we should be aiming for, we can start to brainstorm and discuss models that could work.
Question 1 (opens 17 Sept.)
The question of sustainability and viability of call centres is a good one. At Esoko, we are also piloting a call centre that provides information to farmers in local languages in Ghana. To finance it we are selling this same service to agribusinesses who need to provide their outgrowers with content on key best practices. We are also trying to partner with the mobile operators to leverage their distribution force and marketing might in order to get the word out about the helpline and maintain a high number of calls. But again, the call centre is in the initial stages, and the question of whether it will be viable remains. Typically call centres are expensive and difficult to manage, so you certainly need to take this into consideration.
This is a really interesting study . . . following on from that, mobile network operators are waking up to the market potential of supplying farmers with value added services and information via mobile.
Take a look at the "Connected Agriculture" report released by Vodafone and Accenture in 2011. The report determined that 80% of the potential $138 billion addition to farmers' incomes will come from:
- mobile payment systems like M-PESA that provide farmers with the ability to exchange capital;
- mobile information services that give access to critical, targeted information on commodity prices, weather, disease outbreaks, etc.; and
- helpline services providing key ag tips and real-time advice.
Check out more about this particular study at:
http://www.vodafone.com/content/index/media/news/connected_agriculture.html
In September 2012, Airtel and GSMA mFarmer initiative announced a partnership to launch the 'Sauti ya Mkulima' project to provide 250,000 farmers in Kenya with agric info over mobile. The project seeks to provide farmers with agricultural information and advice, but also aims to create a farmer community where producers can exchange with each other about experiences, social events, and business opportunities. For more details on the project, take a look at the press release at: http://www.airtel.com