Akanksha Barot · How I can help · Foundations and social organisations
Foundations and social organisations
Designing for the year after the funding, which is when most of these tools stop being used.
The pattern I have watched repeat is not a technology failure. A programme designs a good tool, funds it for three years, trains a cohort, reports well, and then the grant closes and the tool has no owner, no budget line, and no one who can change a crop calendar. The design decisions that determine whether that happens are all made in the first quarter.
Who this is for
Whether this page is about you.
- Foundations and philanthropies funding agricultural livelihood programmes.
- NGOs and social enterprises running farmer-facing services directly.
- Programme teams commissioning a digital tool for the first time.
What usually goes wrong
Three problems I keep meeting.
- 01
Sustainability is a section in the proposal rather than a design constraint
Handover to local capacity is decided by architecture and by who is able to edit the content. A training workshop in the final quarter decides nothing. If changing the agronomy advisory for one district requires the original vendor, the programme has an expiry date it has not admitted to.
- 02
Literacy is treated as a translation problem
It is a data model problem. Crop names, units, seasons and agronomic terms differ by district, and a schema that assumed one language with one set of categories will fight every subsequent locale. Voice and icon design are downstream of getting that right.
- 03
Measurement is designed for the report, not for the roadmap
Data collected once a year to satisfy a funder cannot steer a product. Instrumentation that serves both exists, and it has to be decided before build, because retrofitting it means asking field staff to do extra work for someone else’s benefit.
What backs it
Every claim names where it came from.
Behaviour-led UX and localisation for mid-tech farmers across languages, cultural context and agronomy. The six operating conditions on the home page are the standing brief rather than a set of personas.
Jiva AgServices, Indonesia, and AgriCentral, IndiaVoice playback, agent-mediated delivery and phygital models connecting field staff, farmer groups and digital advisory. The channel mix is a product constraint with a cost attached, and it decides who is reachable.
Jiva AgServices, Product Lead, 2021 to 2025Internal tooling for FPO onboarding, farmer management and input-market linkages. Farmer producer organisations are the closest analogue to the collectives most programmes deliver through.
AgriCentral, Head of Product, 2018 to 2021What watching farmers hold a phone actually changed
Four interface decisions came out of it, and none of them are guesses. An icon on its own is not understood, so every icon carries its text label. Buttons have to be visibly, generously clickable, because a fingertip that has done field work is broader than the one the design system assumed. Machine translation is not good enough; the language has to be written by someone who speaks it. And a permission prompt has to arrive at the moment the benefit is obvious, never at first open.
From the Jiva interview on AgriCentral, linked at the foot of this page.Relevant here
The product streams this segment usually needs.
- Farmer advisory
Agronomy guidance a farmer acts on the same week, in the language and at the reading level they actually have. In AgriCentral that meant seven languages, activity schedules built from the crop and the sowing date, and a question channel answered by agronomists and by other farmers.
Source: AgriCentral, Head of Product 2018–2021, launched 31 December 2018. Jiva, Product Lead 2021–2025. - Weather forecast communication
The forecast is a commodity. Turning it into an instruction someone trusts enough to change a spray date is the product.
Source: A fifteen day outlook inside AgriCentral, and the forecast panel on the Jiva advisory screen. - Pest and disease advisory
Identification, threshold and treatment, with a false-positive cost measured in a farmer’s money.
Source: Crop Care in AgriCentral: image-based pest and disease detection, shipped while I was Head of Product. - Field agent management
Visit planning, sequencing, coordination and what each agent is accountable for by the end of the day.
Source: Jiva field coordination product, Indonesia. Roughly 30 percent field staff productivity gain. - Leadership reporting
The internal view leadership actually steers on, rather than the deck assembled the night before the board call.
Source: Internal operations tooling at AgriCentral and Jiva. - Micro-financing
Credit that reaches a smallholder without an address, a credit file, or a spare afternoon.
Source: Jiva, one of four core services on the direct-to-farmer platform.
How it runs
What working together looks like.
- 01
Programme and product design together
What the tool does, who operates it, who funds it in year four, and who is allowed to change the content.
- 02
Measurement that serves both audiences
One instrumentation design that produces the funder’s report and the team’s weekly decisions, without asking field staff to collect twice.
- 03
Handover as a deliverable
Local capacity, documentation and editable content treated as scope with a date, rather than as goodwill at the end.
Questions
Asked before, answered straight.
We are commissioning a digital tool for the first time. Where do we start?
With who will own it in year four, and answer that before scoping features. That single question changes the architecture, the vendor contract, the content model and the budget. Programmes that answer it late usually discover the tool cannot be maintained by anyone they can afford.
Most of our farmers cannot read. What actually works?
Voice, icons that were tested rather than assumed, and a screen that shows one decision instead of a dashboard. It also means designing for the person who is often holding the phone: a younger relative, a neighbour, or a field agent. Designing for the individual farmer alone tends to miss how the phone is really used.
Can you work alongside our implementing partners?
Yes, and it is usually the only way it works. The implementing partner has the trust and the field presence, and their staff will be the ones operating whatever gets built. My job is to make sure the product respects what they already do rather than adding a parallel process they will abandon by month five.
How do you keep the technology from becoming the point?
By being willing to conclude that a piece of it should not be built. Some of the strongest interventions in this space are workflow and process changes with a very small amount of software attached. If the honest answer is a better paper form and a phone tree, that is what I would recommend.
Do you have experience with foundation reporting requirements?
Not directly, and I would rather say so. My reporting experience is corporate and investor-facing at Olam. The measurement design work transfers, the specific compliance formats of a given foundation do not, and I would expect your programme team to hold that side.
What this record is, and what it is not
There is no foundation or NGO engagement on this record, and the measurement experience behind it is corporate and investor-facing rather than grant-facing. The design and sustainability work transfers directly. The specific reporting formats a given funder requires do not, and your programme team should expect to hold that side.
Published elsewhere
- PodcastLearnings from 10M downloads with AgriCentral PM Akanksha BarotThe Crop Chronicles, by Jiva. Episode 5, 31 minutes
How AgriCentral reached ten million downloads, why the first year of adoption was slow, and what transferred to Indonesia.
- InterviewLessons from 10 million downloadsJiva, on Medium
The written version. Acquisition, the seven languages, and the interface decisions that came out of watching farmers hold a phone.