Agricultural Business Tools Farmbook

Name Shaun Ferris and Deepak Jannu Emails: [email protected]

; [email protected]

Company size: CRS - 4000 employees, 70 countries, Techno Brain - 800 employees, 15 countries Profit - Techno Brain : Non profit - CRS

1

Why Farmbook?

Farmbook is designed to provide Farmer facing business planning tools To support our work in

“Value Chains for Vulnerable Farmers”

. Provides a systematic process that helps field agents and farmers to improve decision making about food and financial security :

Helping field agents and farmers to monitor productivity gains and measure support to food security Helping farmers to develop business plans and measure costs, income streams and profits within local and national markets 2

What does Farmbook do?

CURRENT FARMBOOK CAPABILITIES Register farmer groups

• • Collect information on farmers e.g. household and land sizes Register individual farmers within farmer groups

Assess profitability

• • Gather production cost information for specific products Estimate gross margin based on product pricing

Develop and maintain business plan Generate reports

• • Produce a business plan for a specific product. Gather and capture information as a target for sales, product attributes, market strategy, target market, a profitability analysis and a basic implementation plan • • Generate printable reports on profitability assessment and business planning outcomes to be handed to farmers at project levels Generate revenue reports at a cross project level      

ENABLES

Identification of products with market opportunities Upgrade of production system to meet market needs Develop business plan and an implementation plan Facilitate collective sale of produce to identified buyers Assess profitability of marketing strategies Use results from one season to improve marketing activities in subsequent seasons 3

Current management and information structures

Project manager Nutrition Gender Finance, productivity, marketing Theme managers Partner Staff Project staff Partner Staff Project staff Partner Staff Project staff Partner Staff Partner Staff Project staff Partner Staff Project staff CRS Project Field staff Partner Staff Partner Staff Local Partners Field Extension Agents 200 + Farmer Groups 5000 +

Operating Model

We want to adopt a partnership model for Farmbook to ensure long term sustainability that will benefit local partners and primarily the target farmers we serve PARTNERSHIP CRS Local Implementation Partners

• • Strong agriculture methodology Skill building through training • Ability to work closely with farmers through of understanding of local cultures

Techno Brain

• • Enhancement of product to provide more functionality Provide a stable technical platform • • • • •

Target farmers who:

Produce on farms of two to five acres of land Do not own mechanized tools Use limited inputs Are not well organized Have no formal financial links nor opportunistic trading relationships with buyers 6

Roadmap

Together with a technology partner, we envision to deliver additional capabilities within Farmbook to fully support an entire project lifecycle SUBSEQUENT RELEASE CURRENT RELEASE

    Register farmer group Analyze profitability Develop & Maintain Business Plan Generate Reports        Farm logs, to record training & assets delivered Skills acquisition assessments Production scheduling More than one agricultural crop product Non-crop products Link to impact survey analyses New languages

Developed in-house by CRS Developed as a commercial product by a TechnoBrain

7

Business Model

There are various sustainable business models for Farmbook:

Techno Brain Overview

Inception (1997 - 2002)

Started operations in 1997 by setting up state-of-the-art IT Training Center at Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania Expanded operations to Kenya & Uganda by setting up IT Training centers

Strategic Move (2003 - 2008)

Started offering ICT Solutions in the Africa region Set up a Research & Development center in East Africa Expanded business operations across West, East, South & Central Africa Set up training centers in Ethiopia and Malawi

Global Expansion (2009 - 2011)

Set up a Software Development Center In Hyderabad, India Started New Business Operations: BPO / ITES Started operations in USA Setup an office in UAE Set up a Software Development Center in Nairobi, Kenya Trained more than 100, 000 people including Government and Corporate Executives Capacity Building: Hire, train & employ fresh local talent across locations Introduced Employee Exchange Program between India Development Center & Africa

Geography / Location

Current Operations: 13

Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Zambia, Malawi Mozambique, South Africa, UAE, India, USA, UK

New Expansions: 14

South Sudan, Congo, Angola, Burundi, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mali Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin

Reference Clients

P U B L I C NSSF Tanzania KEPHIS Malawi Local Government Uganda Revenue Authority Tanzania Police Force N G O P R I V A T E Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa UNDP Serengeti Breweries Chemi & Cotex Family Health International BERCO Kick Start International Meenakshi Mission Hospital & Research Centre Kenya Airways Pepsi Co

Case Study

Challenges Needs and

The Tobacco Control Commission Malawi wanted to implement a Smart card based Tobacco grower’s registration system and hired Techno Brain for implementing such a system

Solution

• • • • • • The implemented solution consisted of the following: A web based application connecting all the regional offices of TCC with a centralized database.

A terminal application running on a handheld small sites.

device, capable of carrying out registration, renewal and capturing of finger prints for ordinary members at district field A GPS device integration, which captures and stores the GPS co-ordinates of the tobacco growing fields for the purpose of identifying duplicated field registrations.

An offline Grower Finger Print Identification system, to identify multiple registrations by the same grower.

The storage of all the related information will be done in a centralized Database.

Scalable to add new offices, new users, new handheld devices and integrate with other external systems with minimum change and effort • • •

Benefit

Accuracy and accountability to tax collection.

Improved control and information flow between departments.

Increased overall functionality and improved organizational performance.

QUICK FACTS  

Organization

 Name: Tobacco Control Commission, Malawi  Location: Lilongwe, Malawi  Industry: Public Sector  Products / Services: Growers Registration  Revenue: N/A Employees:200+ Website: www.tccmw.com

Future Working Relations

• CRS is a humanitarian development organisation seeking software solutions that improves our service efficiency, quality, scale.

• TechnoBrain is a technology company seeking to help clients deploy existing software solutions and craft new solutions to meet client needs.

• This partnership is seeking to build new opportunities to design and deploy solutions in a more sustainable manner.

13