As always, check out the latest progress data on our Analytics system: http://analytics.digitalgreen.org.  I should note that the numbers of screenings and adoptions of farmers were relatively low during the last quarter as it was the summer season and on-farm activities were limited in many locations. Along with members of the farming community and our new and existing partners, we are looking forward to the monsoon season which appears to be starting up in bits and pieces.

We have been building upon the traction from last quarter and are now transitioning our team members and strategy.  In close collaboration with our partner team members, our team members have established bases in 105 villages across the four states in which we are working.  As we worked to initiate the process of producing and disseminating videos, our team members gained learnings about the rural context, the work of our partners, and the practicalities of mobilizing the community.  With these foundations, we are progressively having our team members transition from the embedded positions within the teams of our partners to regional hubs of our own.  In several locations, we have begun to see that this space affords partners and community members an opportunity to internalize the system for themselves and reduces the possibility of creating a parallel operation.  Our aim is to amplify the interventions of our partners so that they can better achieve their own objectives; however, there is an initial hurdle in institutionalizing a new initiative into the routines of an existing intervention.  Extra time and effort is needed during this initial period, and many of our partners, including PRADAN, BAIF, and SPS, are beginning to hire full-time or contract staff to anchor this transition.  We anticipate that our partners will be able to extend the system even further with the external training and support of our team.

Our new partnerships, including with ASA and ACCESS in Madhya Pradesh and VARRAT and PRAGATI in Orissa, take a similar approach.   We have sought to avoid spreading ourselves too thinly and to leverage the technical support that our team members can provide as well as the aspects of the system, like videos, that can be shared across locations.  We have been moving forward with training programs with the core staff of our new partners as we gear up the kharif season.

To better support our new and existing partners, several of our team members are relocating to new locations and will gradually all move to regional hubs.  Our first two hubs were established earlier this month in the state capitals of Bhubaneswar, Orissa and Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh.  Our team members will be based at these offices and will frequent the field to serve as point persons for our partners – first to understand their existing operations and then to provide them with the necessary technical support to bootstrap the system and to sustain the intervention for the longer-term.

Though they will be withdrawing from their embedded positions, our team members along with our partners will increase their focus on assuring a high-degree quality in all aspects of the system: from video production to mediation to follow-up support to partner- and community-level sustainability.  This will be particularly critical as the number of partners and locations expands.  We have instituted a process of reviewing a checklist based on our standard operating procedures (SOPs) at each of our internal regional meetings on a monthly basis and have identified a list of 21 priorities areas that require special attention for quality assurance.  For instance, video screenings sometimes have been scheduled during late evening hours which community members have found difficult to attend.  By facilitating regular feedback sessions with the community, we have observed that the community’s schedules vary with the seasons and that the timing of the screenings needs to be adjusted accordingly.  We are also experimenting with approaches, like the Sabido Method, to introduce creative elements into the videos to sustain interest levels among viewers and to ensure that the videos screened are relevant in both time- and location-specific dimensions. In the next quarter, we plan to conduct an internal audit on the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the system. 

Two of our current bottlenecks include (1) reduced availability of the video cameras and pico projectors that power the Digital Green system at the grassroots-level and (2) limited Internet connectivity in the areas where our partners and team members operate. 

On (1), external microphones are critical to ensuring good audio quality in our videos but most consumer-grade video cameras that earlier had terminals for connecting external microphones are often being phased out by their manufacturers.  The palm-sized Kodak Zi8 seems to be viable alternative, but it is currently not available in India.  For pico projectors, we have been working with Sima Products to procure them from a manufacturer in China, but we have been told to expect a longer-than-usual lead time for our latest order – the largest that we’ve made till date.  We recently started working with One Media Player Per Teacher to identify a second manufacturer of pico projectors in China which appears to offer units with similar a feature set at half the price.  We also recently identified one of the first distributors of pico projectors in India – very close to our office in New Delhi – but the models that they have from Optoma lack features, like audio output, and are double the price of the units that we have been procuring from Sima Products.  Until the next set of pico projectors arrives, we are trying to stretch our current supply of pico projectors and are using TVs, DVD players, and batteries wherever feasible.

On (2), the data reflected on Analytics is often out of date due to low or intermittent Internet connectivity for those partner staff and team members involved in transcribing data from paper-based forms. To address this issue, our system’s team recently released an alpha version of a data management system, called COCO (i.e., Connect Online, Connect Offline), which allows users to input and access data in areas which have limited or no Internet connectivity.  COCO’s offline mode allows Digital Green and partner team members to access data partitioned based on their role and location and allows them to input data as if they were online.  COCO has been designed to support up to 100,000 users located anywhere in the world and only requires connectivity whenever a user is ready to synchronize their data with the global repository.  Of course, users can always access COCO in an online mode where inputted data updates our Analytics system in real-time.  Built as an application in the Internet browser, COCO requires no additional software installation or maintenance.  COCO has been designed in an open-source, customizable manner and can be deployed without the need of an IT/engineering staff.  Going forward, we’re looking at the possibility of supporting other NGOs by hosting their data and giving them the benefit of not having to invest in and to manage computing infrastructure like servers.

We’ve also been exploring collaboration possibilities with Iowa State University’s extension and outreach department; a USAID request on modernizing extension and advisory services; a consortium led by Institute for OneWorld Health on maternal, newborn, and child health in Bihar; and the agricultural research and extension work of McKnight Foundation in South America.  We also recently deployed a pilot of an interactive voice response (IVR) system with Neil Patel from Stanford University and Tapan Parikh from University of California at Berkeley in Dindori, Madhya Pradesh with our partner, PRADAN.  We are initially looking to use this system to allow individuals who deliver agricultural services to members of a local farmers’ cooperative with a voice-based forum for routing questions to subject-matter experts.  Eventually, we plan to integrate this system with COCO to build unified histories of farmers who interact with the Digital Green system over voice, video, or in person.

If you haven’t kept up to date with our monthly newsletter, I’d invite you to check out the April and May issues of The Nexus.  We’ve generated a bit of buzz lately with some press in Fortune (for Digital Green and also Indrani who is currently on secondment with us) and Ashoka.  We were also pleased to welcome to the team: Shivaji Choudhury to lead our Madhya Pradesh operations as regional program coordinator; Rashmi Kanthi who was an intern in our Madhya Pradesh team and is now with us full-time; and Sreenivas Reddy and Praveen Shekhar who also transitioned to full-time positions in our system's team.

Let the rains begin!