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Agricultural Business Tools
Name Shaun Ferris and Deepak JannuEmails: [email protected] ; [email protected] Company size: CRS - 4000 employees, 70 countries, Techno Brain - 800 employees, 15 countriesProfit - Techno Brain : Non profit - CRS
Farmbook
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Why Farmbook?
Farmbook is designed to provide Farmer facing business planning toolsTo 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
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What does Farmbook do?
Register farmer groups
Assess profitability
Develop and maintain business
plan
Generate reports
• Collect information on farmers e.g. household and land sizes
• Register individual farmers within farmer groups
• Gather production cost information for specific products
• Estimate gross margin based on product pricing
• 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
CURRENT FARMBOOK CAPABILITIES 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
ENABLES
Project manager
Project staff
GenderNutrition
Project staff Project staff Project staff Project staff
Farmer Groups5000 +
Theme managers
CRS ProjectField staff
Local Partners
Field ExtensionAgents200 +
Current management and information structures
Partner Staff
Finance, productivity, marketing
Partner Staff
Partner Staff
Partner Staff
Partner Staff
Partner Staff
Partner Staff
Partner Staff
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Operating Model
CRS
Local Implementation Partners
Techno Brain
PARTNERSHIP
• Strong agriculture methodology
• Skill building through training
• Ability to work closely with farmers through of understanding of local cultures
• Enhancement of product to provide more functionality
• Provide a stable technical platform
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
TO SERVE
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
Roadmap
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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
CURRENT RELEASE SUBSEQUENT RELEASE
Together with a technology partner, we envision to deliver additional capabilities within Farmbook to fully support an entire project lifecycle
Business Model
There are various sustainable business models for Farmbook:
Techno Brain Overview
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
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
Inception (1997 - 2002)
Set up a Research & Development center in East Africa
Started offering ICT Solutions in the Africa region
Expanded business operations across West, East, South & Central Africa
Set up training centers in Ethiopia and Malawi
Strategic Move (2003 - 2008)
Started operations in USASetup an office in UAE
Global Expansion (2009 - 2011)
Set up a Software Development Center In Hyderabad, IndiaStarted New Business Operations: BPO / ITES
Set up a Software Development Center in Nairobi, Kenya
Current Operations: 13Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Zambia, Malawi
Mozambique, South Africa, UAE, India, USA, UK
New Expansions: 14South Sudan, Congo, Angola, Burundi, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mali
Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin
Geography / Location
Reference Clients
NSSF Tanzania
KEPHIS Malawi Local Government
Uganda Revenue Authority
Tanzania Police Force
PUBLIC
Alliance for a Green Revolution
in Africa
UNDP Family Health International
Kick Start Internationa
l
Meenakshi Mission Hospital & Research
Centre
N
G
O
Chemi & Cotex Kenya AirwaysSerengeti Breweries
BERCO Pepsi Co
PRIVATE
Case Study
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
Challenges and Needs
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
SolutionThe 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 device, capable of carrying out registration, renewal and capturing of finger prints for ordinary members at district field sites.
• 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.
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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.