Precision Development

Digital Agricultural Advisory Services (DAAS) Advancing livestock productivity for Ethiopian smallholder farmers

Since October 2019, PxD, in a consortium led by Digital Green, has been implementing a Digital Agricultural Advisory Services (DAAS) project with the objective of strengthening existing digital advisory services and the development of a tech platform (FarmStack) to enable actors to more easily share and utilize data.

DAAS aims to improve smallholder productivity, increase incomes, and enhance the livelihoods of 3.5 million Ethiopian smallholder farmers through cost-effective and targeted extension and advisory services.

The project is being implemented in Oromia, Tigray, Amhara, Sidama, and Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples National Regional States over five years (October 2019 September 2024) and is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO).

Since 2018, Precision Development (PxD) has partnered with the Coffee Board of India (CBI), a statutory body, to deliver the Coffee Krishi Taranga (CKT) digital advisory service to coffee growers.

As of October 2022, CKT was servicing just over 76,500 coffee growers in the states of Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh. In 2021, the Walmart Foundation announced it would support the expansion and intensification of PxDs partnership with CBI to scale services to 150,000 coffee farmers and expand the service to an additional state. To that end, in September 2022, PxD successfully launched services in Andhra Pradesh. Additionally, the Walmart Foundation grant will allow PxD to develop expertise in and focus our services around three key areas within the coffee sector: (i) sustainability, (ii) market linkages, and (iii) gender.

Ensuring access to water is a critical challenge for Kenyan farmers. Water tanks present a promising solution. However, access to credit to purchase tanks is challenging. Together with our partners, we are assessing the impact of asset-collateralized loans to finance water tanks among dairy farmers.

Precision Development (PxD) is collaborating with researchers from the Development Innovation Lab (DIL) at the University of Chicago to build on this research. The research team, in turn, is partnering with two dairy cooperatives: Lessos Farmers Cooperative Society and Sirikwa Dairies and General Limited in Kenyas Rift Valley region. Together, PxD, DIL, and the dairy cooperatives will evaluate the impact of the asset-collateralized loan (ACL) model for the purchase of rainwater harvesting tanks. The financial institutions of the two dairies will manage ACL contracts and repayments in-house.