"Plot quietly and humbly. Manifest fruitfully and abundantly"

Those who know me well, know that they should probably leave the room when I say, “I have an idea”………..

They know that I tend not to have small ideas and after a lifetime of orchestrating many things that many people said were impossible- I am emboldened by a mixture of learnings, good and bad, whose equation adds up to me believing profoundly that wicked problems, can and should be solved. That each of us has the potential to serve those solutions, in small and larger ways.?

My steadfast belief in the power of partnerships and collaborations is rivalled only by my belief in the untapped power of young people, when you trust them and encourage them to dream. So most of the ideas I have now, revolve around mobilising young talent, solving a systemic challenge, and scaling collaboration. My professional focus is and has always been, the protection of our natural?capital and unlocking human potential.?

A little over a year ago, I began designing and developing an idea I had for some time, to build a digital learning platform for small holder farmer families - starting with India. I knew I would need to partner with private sector in order to have the technology strength it would need to drive it's success. I also knew that if the world was facing the food and agriculture crisis that climate change is driving us towards - that it was time to mobilise the people who actually steward a majority of our planet's land, at scale; especially women. 70% of the worlds poor are women and 80% of them are smallholder farmers, who often do not even call themselves farmers.?

I understood profoundly that if farmers didn’t also have routes to markets that were developed to reward them for better and more healthy growing practices, they would not succeed. We would not have access to healthy food and the world would simply not have enough healthy food to survive. Our planet would continue to become depleted.

But an asymmetry existed for smallholder farmers, that was almost incomprehensible; their access to tactical and practical knowledge, existed in fractured and largely human dependant ways. No chance for scale. Worse, no leverage from the many digital technologies or content strategies that we, in the developed world, engage with and utilise every day. So learning new practices, adoption of new behaviours and having synthesised content developed for and with their needs in mind- didn’t exit on a common, open architecture platform, accessible on a smart phone.

So for a year, I have put my head down and gone to work.?

Step I: I joined hands with an agri technology and food company called Innoterra. They partnered me with a young digital Product Manager whose tenacity and energy matched mine and with whom I could build a small but extremely dedicated team. My team and I have faced the bevy of challenges that were always going to come, inside a corporate, in trying to develop a high impact product whose “value” would be built in direct relationship to a more capable and steady supply chain and not a set of transactions that carried a linear short term valuation. Happily, Innoterra and their enlightened leadership placed both trust and resources in my hands over the last year. It is with a new kind of humility I understand the challenges and the courage needed for private sector to seed innovative impact driven solutions.?Innoterra

Step II: Hire a world class human centric design and engineering team to join us in validating our ideas, expanding and deepening them and creating a digital design framework that would ensure that the voices, needs and utilisation by farmers would lead us all to the outcomes we sought. Their challenge was to use design to bridge a low literacy and bandwidth constrained ecosystem across any language we wished to engage with. We needed the design of the technology solution to build trust if our objectives were to - Increase farmers earnings. Reduce farmers costs. Mitigate farmers risks. Enable farmers to become more resilient. Tomorrow Partners

Step III: Work alongside a world class rural Social Enterprise to develop an initial content library and a replicable tool kit for content creation that would resonate with rural families. It would distill and synthesize the theory of science and technology concepts in a way that any rural man, woman or young person could consume and then action.?Barefoot College International

Now I won't say this year has been easy or that the journey to evolution has been linear. Thousands of farmers have participated and farmers are not a homogenous group. From this ground truth we have learned, unlearned and re-learned. Designed and re-designed. What exists today is so much more than we ever imagined a year ago.?

In May we will release in india,?what I think will be the world’s first Learn to Earn platform for smallholder farmers that tracks transitions in behaviour both in learning and toward climate positive action. It is designed, most importantly, to help farmers link to markets with what they then produce and to produce our food in net positive ways for our planet.

Our minimum viable product (MVP) is an android app that acts as both as a Learning Management System and a smart Customer Relationship Management System. It will exemplify a collaboration between private sector, social enterprise and human centric design. It is both grounded in the community and grounded in the urgency for our farmers to gain stability and resilience in all that means.

It will be free for farmers anywhere and everywhere. It will be able to be used without literacy skills or high digital technology literacy. This Hi Tech product can accept content from an unlimited number of partners from any geography and any sector who have quality, relevant and engaging knowledge to share with smallholder farmers. It can be optimised using a Hi Touch toolkit that will be downloadable and free to any organisation, government or extension service working directly with smallholder farmers.?

Success will be measured and impact for farmers will be tracked. It is the ability of the system to become smarter and more precise with each interaction over time, that will be one of its most important features. Based on that data we will curate an environmentally positive, quality offering of services, products and content that for each farmer will look and feel bespoke.

Farmers have been crystal clear with us: They want transparency in the way they transact, the way they learn about things, versus the way they are sold products. They want transparency in the way they are paid and the way they access finance. They have told us they know that climate is changing and they want upstream solutions that are practical to be able to mitigate and de-risk themselves and their families. They want incentives and to be rewarded for investing their time and effort into changing entrenched and socially driven bad practices to better ones for them and the planet. We are planning to give farmers exactly what they have told us they want. We are going to drive confidence, competence and connectedness in the smallholder farming community; in order to increase their stability.

From now until launch in May watch this space as I publish a series of articles about the journey we have been on this year, the farmers realities we have encountered and the extraordinary young people who have come around me to make this product possible.?

If you would like to partner with us or join our team, contribute to content design, farmer engagement or supporting the tech side of our work, please contact me via Linked or reach out to?any of the following people: [email protected], [email protected]