In Andhra Pradesh, India, smallholder farmers, women farmers have to operate under extreme conditions of weather, lack of natural resources, increasing input costs, lack of post-harvest opportunities, market information asymmetry and go through various layers of the value chain. This challenge needed a robust solution and hence this project was undertaken to mitigate it and thereby assist the women farmers with the help of PANDO’s intuitive solutions for the value chain.

While smallholder farmers have their fair share of challenges, the dryland farmers, women farmers have to bear more brunt due to extreme climate conditions. Upon that, the commodity value of their harvest is mainly seized by the intermediaries in the name of cleaning, grading, sorting, minimal processing and even gender bias in the name of technical know-how. Due to this infrastructure limitation, lack of direct access to the market, the farmers suffer even more.

However, with the arrival of established retail players in tier II and III cities of India, these companies are looking forward to directly retailing raw grains from farmers and package their products under their own brand. Yet, investing and relentlessly developing relationships with suppliers, vendors are the main challenge for these retailers. But, farmers can make most of this opportunity by directly catering to the markets by leveraging primary and secondary processing. To bridge this gap in the value chain and assist women farmers especially till the last mile, PANDO’s insights were helpful.

Making farming a profitable enterprise is indeed a challenge especially for women as there are multiple interventions like cropping system-based approaches, drought management strategies, resource conservation models to post-harvest management and food processing opportunities, and capacity building development that needs to be specifically identified by the supply chains.

To initiate an overhaul for the same, this project was implemented across 8 mandals of Anantpur district, Andhra Pradesh. The mission of this project was to enhance crop practices and set up primary, secondary units. These units would be in turn handled by the farmer groups and they could link their harvest to retail, last-mile markets through the help of PANDO. Broadly, this initiative would benefit the farming community as a shareholder in the unit and also empower more women farmers to become financially independent.

In order to successfully set up the processes for the same, the local youth and women were engaged. This not only provided employment opportunities but also assisted in creating more opportunities for micro-entrepreneurs in the value chain. Furthermore, this project helped in increasing the farmers' share in the consumer price. This helped in curbing the margins that were getting split in the value chain. PANDO enabled this digital transformation and thereby helped the women farmers and their community by large.

Approximately 2400 dryland farmers, 3600 women farmers and youth will be benefited from this project. It would improve their agricultural income with the help of quality standards adoption. More than 300 rural households will improve their nutrition through the project. Most importantly, the digital transformation of the value chain will provide consistent support to the communities there.

Right from the inception, this project aimed at improving the agricultural income, creating employment for women farmers and micro-entrepreneurship opportunities in the value chain through digital transformation and improve the nutrition of rural households and it successfully achieved the same with the help of PANDO’s intuitive insights.

We profiled 15 Lakh farmers for them. We successfully tracked more than 15K demos for them. We increased the ROI for this seed company by 12X with the help of Pando’s demo effectiveness.