Mohammad Shahroz Jalil
| Organization | Katalyst-Swisscontact |
|---|---|
| Organization type | International Organization |
| Country | Bangladesh |
Mr. Mohammad Shahroz Jalil has been with Katalyst since July 2003. He has a business background with work experience of over 12 year in development and private sector. Mr. Jalil started his career has Trade marketing officer for British American Tobacco and then moved on to different assignments before starting his own initiative on export related IT related services. Later on he moved into Katalyst where as Director, Services groups he looks over the work in the cross sector markets like ICT, Media, Distribution, Haats and sees how these markets could act as catalyst for growth of key sectors of the economy. He has gained significant experience in understanding private and public sector incentives, negotiating and making deals with the private sector and most importantly linking them to sustainable development. He has participated in various international training and conferences on BDS, LED approach, Value Chain analysis, project management in development etc. Mr. Jalil has undertaken various consulting assignment for private sectors and aid agencies. He was also involved as part of a consulting team involved in a country scoping of a market development approach in Fiji Island for Aus aid.
This member participated in the following Forums
Forum Forum: "Strengthening Agricultural Marketing with ICT" December, 2011
Question 1: Market Information - users of mobile technology
Let me share some of my expereince in working for a project called Katalyst (www.katalyst.com.bd). We have been working with the two largest telecom operators in our country, (Telenor and Orascom) to deploy two ICT based platforms targeting farmers. One is a telecenter led model and working with the mobile phone company we have succussfully launched 500 such ICT center acrosss the whole of Bangladesh. These center serve rural audience including farmers with range of service including agriculture informations; these center have been running commerically for the last 4 years. The other model is an agriculture helpline which is hosted by human agents, under a call center and operated by the telco itself as a value added service. This too has been running on its own since 2009 and has registered more than million phone call todate. (Although having human agents is more costly we had found from our research that farmers are reluctant to interact with IVR and SMS). To make the whole model more sustainable, instead of the project supplying agro contents, we have identified and developed ICT based agro content provider who have commerical agreeement with these telcos. Subsequent Impact measurement (which itself comes with a lot of challenges and was the subject area of our recent online collaboration with e-agriculture: http://www.e-agriculture.org/content/policy-brief-challenges-and-opportunities-capturing-impact-ict-initiatives-agriculture) has so far shown a significant number of farmers have benefitted in terms of better disease prevention, new cultivation techniques, better information on inputs etc.
We have tried to work with market price information but frankly speaking that has proven to be quite difficult. First of all, thanks to the high mobile reach, farmers do get to know the market price of different markets, however owing to logistical issues, they are unable to tap into these opporutnities. Second, market price is so fluctuating and different across different markets, credibility is an issue. We have had some success with a local software platform that was developed called cellbazaar (which allows sellers to post 'sell' information through phone) but i guess more work could be done here.
Forum Forum: "Challenges and Opportunities for Capturing Impact in ICT initiatives in Agriculture" September, 2011
Week 2 - What are the critical operational aspects in the process of capturing impacts of ICT initiatives in agriculture?
At Katalyst we work with telecenter and call center to provide demand led information for farmer including fish farmers. About 7 t o8 years, there was a project which used ICT call center methodology but the difference there it was aimed at the shrimp farmers and it was the project that operated the content. Learning from such model, we from the get go, looked at new ways at linking ICT content operators with the mobile phone operator who are the final custodian of the call center or the telecenters. Hope this helps
On a different note, today marks the end of this forum that Katalyst and e-agriculture started on Sep 25. During this time we recevied a lot of inputs, queries, knowledge from various participants. We are thankful to them and hope that through this forum we have been to show how increasingly we must be focused in our results measurment system. Resuls measurment are an important process of what we do because they not only help us capture what we have achieved but more importantly if done right helps us do even better.
ICT initiatives has its own share of challenges and opportunities which makes this whole monitoring process even more exciting.
I would like to thank the E-agriculture and all those behind this initiaitve, in helping us use this forum and highligh this important topic.
Thanks!
Before it initiates any process to capture impact, a project needs to be very clear about
- who are the targeted beneficiaries?
- how are they impacted?
- To what extent would the project go in capturing its impact?
The answer to these queries, among others, has implication on the operational aspects of the measurement process.
For instance, what should be the sample size, what sampling method do we follow (qualitative or quantitative), how do we attribute (Control vs. treatment-if that is possible), what form of questionnaire we use (open or closed end or mixed) and last but not least how do validate the data.
In developing countries, where secondary data on the universe populatin or listing is scare in terms of availability and perhaps reliability, quantitative measurement often becomes very difficult.
When it comes to beneficiaries questionnaire, questions based on recall of the respondent often is very unreliable. We have come across situations where the respondent was able to tell an overall benefit figure, but when we dug a bit bitter, his benefit figure did not add up.
Under ICT when it comes to capturing impact at end user, one has to realize that there are different channels already existing which perhaps also impact in the same way for the same end user. Case in point ICT channels providing information, but perhaps the same information is also being provided by extension worker, input retailers or other peer groups. How does one then identity the level of impact the project's own interventions has created?
These are just some challenges that I thought are worth highlighting.
Do you explicitly construct logical and linear paths for your programmes?
First of all let me confess. I am not an ICT4D professional. Hence my knowledge is somewhat limited. However based on what I have seen and the implementation that I have done for ICT initiatives in agriculture, my assessment is more often than not, under ICT4D, indicators that predominate generally concentrate on ICT indicators like service market adoption, penetration or new services offer, users satisfactions with ICT services etc. While that is all very essential, it perhaps stops at what happens after that; what is the benefit the users experiences after using the service or more explicity how do the lives of the poor change. One could argue that there are far too many attribution challenges in doing such exercise however I see this differently. In our project, we make all the effort to relate how adoption of the ICT services we are promoting are impacting on the poor. I agree that there are difficulties but in the end it is possible to draw the logical chain and measure the impact. In agriculture we have found that availing agriculture information services largely benefit poor farmer in having better crop care leading to lower risk of crop loss through diseases. Doing such measurement at the last mile more importantly also allows us to focus on what we should do best and how we should we design and implement our interventions.
Hence coming back to your question I don't think it is that much to do with agriculture,although perhaps it does make it easier to measure. It has more to do with who are your target beneficiary and to what level changes do you expect and how do you go about measuring it.
I guess this is very important issue that is perhaps somehow getting missed in the discussion. I have just come back from an internal discussion where we have tried to map how the changes we have introduced in the ICT market system for the poor, have been internalized by the markets we are intervening in. And what we arrived at is that this process of internalization by the market system is anything but linear. While it is perhaps prudent to have a game plan in mind in seeing how the changes should happen (and that perhaps could be linear), it is far more realistic and practical to see from a logical or result chain perspective. Even then I would argue that there are certain other dimensins, qualitative, which you as implementator need to be aware of, if you are trying to capture your changes proprely.
Overall the point I am trying to make is that by thinking it in a logical path has certain advantages but also be mindful that you need to keep track of many other changes in the market systems, which could be qualitative and which are perhaps very important for you to understand how much effect your interventions are having on the market system itself.
What is the most effective way to measure the impact of ICT for development (ICT4D) initiatives?
Answering to Michael's query, M4P is an acronym for Making markets work for the poor. To elaborate it is an approach whereby market growth or development is facilitated but which leads to pro-poor growth.
Introduction and Question 1
Hi Surabhi
The challenges that you mention are very similar to what we face in our implementation. We are working in partnership with a mobile phone operator and helped established 500 telecenters across the country. These centers are self sustaining and provide a host of services include agriculture information. We hve done baseline and post intervention impact assessment and have found that among others better crop disease management (leading to "loss saved/not incurred') is the primary means of how this ICT initiatives impacts on the poor. However the challenge that present itself, is farrmers tend to share information with another and also that there is multiple information sources. Hence how does one attribute the extent of impact to an interventions. For us, we are trying different approaches, among others; first being to acknowledge all significant and relevant information source, second probing beyond our ICT sources to see whether other factors where also responsble and thirdly doing control and treatment groups. (although considering our scale, the third option sometimes is quite difficult to undertake)
Among the several things that I have learned while implemeting interventions with ICT in agriculture, is that result measurment is something that starts off at the very get-go. Some have tendency to start thinking of capturing results only after interventions are proving to be successful. This outlook I believe make result measurement a very reactive tool. On the other hand when you have the clarity about results measurement from the very begining, in terms of what key factors are we trying to change, how would it change, how would we capture it, etc it will not only help you design better intevenions but also allow the result measurement processing to be a tool for proving and improving your work; hence a pro-active tool
Also when it comes to ICT initiatives, having such clarities beforehand, helps you, to an extent find the right areas of partnership and allows you to draw a much clearer picture of the overlapping areas of interest in capturing results between your organization and your partner organizations, if any.