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Agricultural Business Tools

Name Shaun Ferris and Deepak JannuEmails: shaun.ferris@crs.org ; djannu@technobrainltd.com 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.