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M&E for increased impact - a digital solution for enhancing women's access to agricultural information and extension services
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This presentation was given by Pranati Mohanraj (CARE USA), as part of the Annual Scientific Conference hosted by the University of Canberra and co-sponsored by the University of Canberra, the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) and CGIAR Collaborative Platform for Gender Research. The event took place on April 2-4, 2019 in Canberra, Australia. Read more: https://www.canberra.edu.au/research/faculty-research-centres/aisc/seeds-of-change and https://gender.cgiar.org/annual-conference-2019/
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M&E for increased impact - a digital solution for enhancing women's access to agricultural information and extension services
- Pranati Mohanraj August 20, 2014 M&E for Increased Impact – A Digital Solution for Enhancing Women’s Access to Agricultural Information and Extension Services Seeds of change conference Canberra Dr. Pranati Mohanraj Technical Advisor – Monitoring, Learning and Evaluation CARE USA
- CARE’s Pathways program ToC
- Participatory Performance Tracker (PPT) Tool
- Producer Group No. 1 Producer Group No. 1000
- Digital solution
- Workflow overview Manage Farmers Manage Groups Manage Season PPT Group PPT Register New Group Register New Farmers Start New Season PPT 1 - Groundnuts End Season PPT 2 - Groundnuts PPT 1 - Soya Group PPT 1 Group PPT 2
- • Data sent to the cloud server • Easy accessibility of data • Aggregated farmer level data on excel format
- Benefits of mobile technology
- What did the digitized PPT enable? Categorization Group maturity score of > 75 Group maturity score of 50 – 74 Group maturity score of 25 – 49 Group maturity score of 0 – 24
- Lessons learned • Robust trainings are an effective method to prepare staff who lack the skills needed for successful implementation of the application. • Demonstrating the system, with real world challenges and solutions builds staff capacity significantly. • Due to expected turnover, it is important that a robust training plan is in place so that if key personnel leaves the organization there is still knowledge in house to address challenges. It’s worth mitigating this risk by distributing knowledge across the team.
Editor's Notes
- CARE’s Pathways program was designed to improve smallholder women farmers’ productivity by empowering women to be more fully engaged in equitable agricultural systems. The program was funded by BMGF and was implemented in six countries working with 50,000+ women farmers and around 3500 groups. CARE worked with its frontline staff for capacity building of smallholder women farmers. FLS imparted trainings on improved agricultural practices to groups of women farmers. What we were aspiring to achieve was dependent on farmers adoption of improved ag practices. But how do know that farmers are adopting the improved practices to enhance their crop production?
- To capture this, one of the tools that CARE developed was the participatory performance tracker or the PPT. This participatory tool facilitates behavior change that CARE promotes in the communities by putting project participants in charge of assessing their own behaviors, identifying gaps, and finding solutions to address those. PPT is a simple tool that communities can understand and use for their own course corrections. At the same time, this helped project staff to generate data and analyze both at the local as well as global level to identify and adapt to trends. The purpose of the PPT was to track the adoption of farming practices both at the group level as well as the individual farmer level twice every farming season. FLS meet with each of the groups and gather data on the ag practices adopted by the farmers that season. To date, the tool has been used in 8 countries across Africa and Asia and applied in 16 value chains.
- Working with the paper based PPT tool with thousands of producer groups spread across communities and countries, it became difficult for us to have an overarching sense of what was working, what we were struggling with, and what problems were recurring across the program. Paper based data collection process was abysmally slow, and this made analysis difficult, and made the effort of collecting data a waste because by the time we had data in hand we had no time to examine the results as we were ready for the next round of data collection.
- To address these key issues, CARE worked closely with Dimagi, a social enterprise organization, to digitize the PPT tool. Using the CommCare, the mobile case management platform, we created a tablet based application. This application is capable of being used in low resource settings where data can be collected even in the absence of connectivity.
- The workflow looks like this. This allows the FLS to register farmers and groups and edit their profiles. They also have a provision to register a new groups, add new members to an existing group, remove members from a group and edit key information about them. Using this application we collected data on the adoption of best practices for different value chains e.g. soya and Gnuts in this case. The final step in the PPT process was to complete the group assessment. at the end of the group assessment an aggregate rating for the group was calculated by the application and was available in the data exports on the server. In this way the group’s efficacy as a whole was monitored using the group assessment module in the application.
- All data collected on the tablet was sent to the cloud server where it was stored. We could access data anytime and also exported to an excel file. This aggregated farmer level data on adoption was used for analysis at various level.
- Here is one example of an Excel export. Each row here represents a farmer’s rice VC record for 2014. Each column represents a specific practice. If the farmer was checked off the list in the application for adopting that practice, a yes appears in the relevant column in this Excel export. Similarly, group level data was also available from the cloud server where the Excel export showed the total farmers in a group that adopted specific practices.
- Finally, we also included a knowledge base in the application for our staff. This proved useful and provided FLS with a ready knowledge library on recommended farming practices.
- All in all, the digitized version of the PPT with the mobile application provided a light-weight and user-friendly case tracking tool to the extension workers. It also provided us a set of rigorous worker performance monitoring tools for supervisors and country team leaders and a robust platform for the program staff dedicated to monitoring and evaluation.
- We got real time and more accurate data, didn’t have to wait for 4 to 6 months as was the case before. Data validation was done on a daily basis as the supervisors could use the cloud server to monitor their staff and provide timely support.
- Determined aggregate group performance at state, district, block, and village levels Identified challenge areas Analyzed data by practice area and identified where trainings and interventions were working and where they were not Identified high- and low-performing groups in order to study what makes them work or struggle Reallocated staff and resources to support struggling groups
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