Ezrah in India

For many, many years I've dreamed of visiting India, and I'm so thankful that a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to do so in order to visit three of Ezrah Charitable Trust's existing partners and meet two potential new ones.

SMALL-SCALE AGRICULTURE:

Digital Green partners with farmers, grassroots organizations and government agencies in five countries on two continents, leveraging an AI-powered platform to co-create sustainable farming solutions.

Huge thank you to Nidhi Bhasin and Narendra Kandimalla for serving as such wonderful hosts and to Jack Kelsey and Duncan Cunninghame from Jasmine Social Investments for letting me tag along on their field visit.

Highlights included:

• Visiting a Farmer Producer Organization (FPO) in Vijayawada where we discussed soil testing, quality testing and market linkages.

• Visiting a Farmer Service Center (FSC) where hundreds of farmers watch videos displaying best practices and learn how to use Digital Green's multi-modal AI-powered tool called Farmer.chat.

• Visiting chili, cotton, and turmeric fields and watching Farmer.chat detect pests and diseases in real-time.

Kheyti designs, adapts and implements low-cost farming solutions that help small farmers increase yield and predictability of produce. They developed a “Greenhouse-in-a-box” – an affordable, modular greenhouse, bundled with full-stack agronomy services.

Huge thank you to Kaushik Kappagantulu , Areeb Athar and Ayush Sharma for showing me dozens of greenhouses and introducing me to multiple farmers.

Highlights included:

• Visiting their R&D Site outside Hyderabad and getting to see multiple iterations of their greenhouse designs and seeing the literal fruits of their agronomy innovation, i.e. experimenting with the best crops and best methods to grow crops within greenhouses.

• Visiting farmers in Chevalla growing marigolds, chili plants, and spinach within their Kheyti greenhouses. Even though the farmers were diverse in backgrounds and growing different crops, it was so consistent how the greenhouses increase the yield, quality and therefore income of each farmer.

EDUCATION:

Raspberry Pi Foundation provides curriculum, resources, and training for students to learn about computing and how to create with digital technologies both in a school and out-of-school setting.

Huge thanks to Anuj Alphonson, Mamta Manaktala, and Suprava Prusty for taking me around Odisha and Telangana to see RPF's rollout of computing curriculum mainly within government schools, as well as through coding clubs.

Highlights included:

• Meeting some of the Grade 9 and 10 students in Odisha who are learning to program using Scratch

• Visiting an out-of-school coding club sponsored by Unmukt Foundation

• Visiting the Telangana Social Welfare Society (TSWREIS)'s residential high school where they presented coding projects which included motorized cars playing soccer, a breathalyzer that automatically switches off engines.

• Visiting the Telangana Social Welfare Society’s residential college where they presented coding projects which included humidity detector, seismic activity reader, and sensored walking stick for the visually-impaired.

Parivaar works towards the care and development of children who are highly vulnerable to exploitation, victimization and trafficking, including orphans, street children, abandoned children, and extremely impoverished children from the tribal areas of West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh. It also conducts many more humanitarian activities such as mobile health clinics, eye clinics, and a 24/7 ambulance service.

Huge thank you to Siddharth Parmar , Kapil Bharadwaj , Aakash Jaiswal and the rest of the team at Parivaar for showing me the incredibly thoughtful way in which they serve these communities.

Highlights included:

• Visiting several “seva kutirs”, where teachers from the local community teach children of primary and secondary school age in foundational education: math, Hindi and English.

• Visiting two of their residential institutions where about 1100 youth from marginalized communities learn a full school curriculum supplemented by sports, art, dance and music.

• Meeting a few beneficiaries of their eye clinics, who are diagnosed in their local village, transported to receive cataract surgery at their partner eye hospital, and provided aftercare, all free of charge.

TECHNOLOGY FOR DEVELOPMENT:

Institute for Transformative Technologies leverages existing early-stage technologies to reduce R&D risk and time-to-market, engineers products that are fit for purpose, and invests in deep, trusted partnerships with established private companies in emerging markets who have lasting, local footprints and are hungry to build businesses to serve low-income segments.

Huge thanks to Shashi Buluswar and Noha El-Ghobashy for showing me some of the incredible technologies they have co-developed with partners across India:

• Green fertilizer (Nagpur) - Goal: To design modularized, decentralized production of green fertilizer (ammonium nitrate) at a per-ton cost competitive with conventional fertilizer production. The plant to produce ammonium nitrate solution (ANSol) is still under production, but I had the opportunity to meet their main partner BVR Enterprise which is a developer of equipment and plants for exotic metals.

• Solar mini-grids (Lucknow) - Goal: To create local supply chains for solar panels, mini-grid systems and power electronics in LMICs. The local distributor/implementor in India is Tata Power (TP Renewable Microgrid), and I loved meeting a few of the SMEs saving significant amounts of money by using these mini-grids.

• Mini-sewage/waste treatment (Pune) - Goal: To implement nature-based sewage treatment to enable water reuse. The main partner is PriMove, one of India’s most innovative designers and developers of sustainable waste management solutions. Their Tiger Bio Filters (TBF) system pumps raw sewage through a multi-stage filtering system, the star of which are earthworms which consume 99% of fecal pathogens. Output can be either recycled grey water, nutrient rich compost, or both. We visited a golf club that is using a TBF system:

Even though Ezrah is focused primarily on supporting organizations in sub-Saharan Africa rather than South Asia, I can affirm how so many of the same challenges and solutions transcend the Global South, and how much knowledge and experience can be transferred bilaterally.