The year 2022 was special. It was the 6th year of our incorporation and the first open year, after the experience of the pandemic. If there was an overarching theme it was of finding our roots. Institutionally Vriddhi’s roots seem to be in learning and listening.
I am Kisan – farmer services
We started the year with expanded partnerships with organisations and farmer collectives to support their linkage with markets and for all farmers in these collectives to have access to the information that allows them to make decisions and get returns. We are still understanding how community level aggregation and sale can go together with each farmer having full and timely information. We believe that the two are not mutually exclusive. The experience has given us more clarity on what can be the future for I am Kisan if it is to partner more institutions. We actively seek partnerships institutionally in the region.
In parallel, our work with farmers directly continued. We added capacity and facilitated 183 sale deals for small farmers at their first mile! We started intensive presence in the weekly haats that is yielding some good insights on markets and smallholder farmers. We collect daily prices from 5 markets, with linkages in 13 markets in the region from where we collect prices.
We got a breakthrough this year in jackfruit for instance, where just the last mile connect, and better price information, led to as much as double the price realisation for the farmers in their own local haat. Farmers keep coming back to us to pay for subscription, they complain when they find our rates are not being useful for them and they negotiate hard to sell. All of this inspires us to keep going.
We strengthened our internal systems by improving our subscriber management system and recording our information on market deals. We also did further research and development on a raspberry pi based solution, which can be used for broadcasting prices in a local area for those who do not have internet.
A high point for us was the facilitation of a convening of farmers from the region to farmers in Jagdalpur. This learning visit we are sure will have many ripples of change.
Institutional Development Services
One of the ways of accelerating impact is to help the institutions working to re-examine their assumptions, reconnect with their purpose, reflect and build on their learnings.
We were invited by our associate Payal Randhawa of B Works, to join her in working with Mahila Housing Trust to develop their donor management capacities. We started with mapping the donor journey to identify the main thresholds. Based on detailed conversations with the team, we designed a two day learning workshop on building donor management capacities. Developing a shared understanding and getting inspired by the organisation journey, examining their assumptions against data and evidence that they also had, using simple tools to manage donor relations helped the team to take stock and plan forward for their own roles vis a vis donor management. Real life cases helped surface the difficulties at individual level and highlighted the institutional scaffolding that was needed. A manual was developed to support ongoing work at the organisation level.
We initiated this year partnership with Gram Vikas in their organisation learning exercise in July 2022. This entails Learning from the past, understanding the challenges and opportunities of the present and preparing for the future. It is a rare exercise that allows for 40 plus years of development journey of communities, programs, organisation, eco systems to be studied. We started by supporting conceptualisation of the exercise. We then facilitated the first workshop with team members and associates of the organisation to identify some key hypotheses on how change has happened and what is the legacy of the organisation which must be carried forward in its future programs. what are the geographies or programs where this experience can be studied? Once these were done, we worked with the GV team to scope out three studies that would generate evidence and data that would help make qualified statements about how change had happened and what were possible ways in which GV, consciously and unconsciously, ended up supporting the process. What were stances that helped and those that did not. The study terms of references were then put out and proposals invited from consultants. The work continues into 2023-24. The experience of continuing working with an exercise which has learning at its heart and spans generations of work has been humbling and one of learning.
We worked with another organisation in its 50th year – IFOAM Organics International – for its strategic plan. Gwen Hanrahan came on board along with Vartika Jaini to support the strategic planning. Rosemary Viswanath provided us strategic support in the assignment. The exercise started in April, with a workshop with the team in May 2022 in Bonn. We closed the exercise in September 2022. It was a learning exercise as consultants to accompany an organisation with a complex context. It generated insights for us on the significance of context and the possibility of learning, particularly for organisations working with large and complex mandates. It also showed the significance of how the primary task can be a resource – in showing helpful boundaries for an organisation – particularly where individual passion matches organisational purpose.
A final and most important constituency for us- institutionally – is the farmer organisations and collectives. We worked with Arya.ag, in developing their strategy and team capacity for an intervention that supported digital technology for FPCs. The focus was on leveraging the digital tools already available with Arya for the benefit of the farmer collectives. We helped the team deployed for this first identify what is the idea of the FPC in the mind – what were assumptions, conscious and unconscious, that they were making about the collectives, their role and the role of technology. This helped to further clarify the purpose of bringing digital technology and the boundaries that one can expect with the nature of this intervention. For instance, equipping the FPC with digital technology does not by itself mean empowering farmers with technology. With the sharpened focus, Arya team developed personas of the FPCs and the specific benefits that each of the existing Arya tools offered to these personas.
There were learning experiences for us and for the organisations, even though they did not translate into further work. One was a dialogue for an organisation development intervention with a community based group in Assam. A second was for capacity building for partners of a foundation in Ladakh. In both cases, we were clear that the focus had to be on learning from experience rooted in these specific contexts. It is sometimes a cliche – that practitioners know best. Practitioners know but accessing one’s experience is hard and transformative, it needs courage and skilled work. It requires a process of examining assumptions – some of them unconsciously held. To work along this lived experience is critical and that is the partnership we strive to provide to organisations. Another exploration that did not go further was an end of project evaluation. It helped us develop a methodology that incorporated the subjective experience into the evaluation. We would have worked with data to find episodes of change. Deep dive into those episodes – collectively sense making with the community – would have helped factor in the subjective experience into the program evaluation.
Our experience on working for a proposal in response to the Gender fund of Co-impact, inspired and gave us clarity on the imperative that the place of women in agriculture needed to change from that of labour to leadership for sustained change in gender relations in society. As women and their institutions work successfully in markets and make their presence felt, this change does happen. This brought new energy to our work with FPCs. The narratives we heard from the women leaders were so inspiring that we decided to put them out through a Bolo Behen presence on Instagram and Youtube. We will be building on this in the year 2023-24, with focussed and long term interventions in building institutional capacity of farmer collectives and also a learning community for women leaders.
Communication and Convening Services
We collaborated with Neelanjana Banerjee, Reels and Tracks for our communication work. Swapnil Gaikwad brings his magic in translating concepts into posters and then his patience in working with us through the detail!
Our work with SRIJAN and Sustain Plus on making films and communication products, helped us see how institutional learning can be furthered through working on specific communication products. For SRIJAN, we made a film that captured the ending of a project. It was a short project – affected by COVID. It showed us how listening carefully to the community carefully gives a sense of what has been achieved. It helped connect the many interventions supported by the program into one narrative – tayyar hain – as it showed how this project had whet the appetite of the community and sown the seeds for a change in their relationship with agriculture as a vocation.
Sustain Plus asked us to support their intervention in slurry based fertilisers by developing communication material that spoke to farmers – what was the benefits they saw and how might that message be amplified. We developed a poster and a film after listening to farmers who had produced and used these fertilisers. The potential of these fertilisers for farmers and for agriculture was inspiring for us. We hope the products will be useful in carrying the message further.
Plans for the coming year!
In the coming year 2023-24, we will for strengthen the focus on our work with respect to market advisory for smallholder farmers. It is about 5 years since we put out I am Kisan. We are now ready to bring out a leaner more focussed application, which we will start work on this year to show our focus on market based advisory for smallholder farmers. We deepen our presence in the region and aim at doing a deal a day. We will also retain focus on subscribers – which is the heart of I am kisan work and expand these numbers.
We will expand our institutional building work with non profits this year – furthering more purpose driven work. We will intensify our work with community institutions. One of the steps in this direction is to start a longer term ongoing initiative with farmer companies that helps to shift the focus from labor to leadership of women farmers in agriculture.
To accelerating impact!
