Connected-Farmers

Creating more resilient rural
economies
REEMA NANAVATY, DIRECTOR, SELF EMPLOYED WOMEN’S ASSOCIATION
OF INDIA (SEWA)
The Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) is a
member-based organisation of poor self-employed women
workers. We have over 1.93 million women members across
14 states. Agriculture is a key source of livelihood for our
members in rural areas.
Despite putting in long hours of work to produce food,
small and marginal farmers and agriculture labourers are
hampered by many different factors including having only
a small marketable surplus to sell, reliance on local traders
and middlemen, low market rates for their produce and
lack of access to storage facilities. As a result, many are not
able to provide adequate food for themselves, their children
and family members. They are also more vulnerable to the
impacts of economic crises and climate change.
To help improve food security for farmers and communities,
we designed a Rural Distribution Network (RUDI), which now
reaches 1.1 million households and provides an income
for 3,000 self-employed women retailers. The institution
is owned and managed by poor grassroots women and
employs hundreds of poor women at every stage of the
supply chain.
Looking ahead
Success factors
This system could be used in any agricultural market where
there is local production, processing and distribution,
and strong local demand for produce. Co-operatives with
downstream retail operations will be most suited to the service.
The service must be easy to use, even for those using a mobile
for the first time, and customised to local circumstances and
language. The co-operatives are critical partners to achieve this
customisation and to deploy the service.
Challenges to scale-up
The RUDI initiative has been developed with donor funding
and a key challenge with this service type is developing a selfsustaining
commercial model. Incorporating a small charge for
each transaction made on the platform would be one way to
enable this.
Future opportunities
Deploying this service will result in large quantities of data
being collected on farmer production and rural agricultural
markets. There are opportunities to use this data to further
extend the service to incorporate producer loans and crop
insurance products and to make improvements in service
delivery such as truck routing.
By integrating mobile solutions into our network, we’ve seen
significant benefits for women retailers. The technology
enables them to operate more efficiently and improve
their income, which benefits their whole community and
farmers in the supply chain too. Now, we want to extend
the use of mobile to the farmers supplying RUDI. This will
further improve efficiency across the whole value chain and
contribute to more resilient local economies in rural areas.
Vodafone Connected Farming in India 29