Cultivating Change through the Private Sector: Learning from Empowering 97,000+ Women Farmers in India

Dec 2023

While A4W India focused on extending high-impact, digitally-enabled services to at least 100,000 women SHFs in three large Indian states, the project reached 97,000+ smallholder farmers. This was, however, achieved through large-scale partnerships with prominent industry players to deliver the goal. The three private sector partners included Dehaat, Samunnati and Frontier Marketing.

Dehaat is a fast-growing start-up and one of the few companies providing end-to-end solutions and services. Dehaat operates with an extensive network of 11,000+ DeHaat centres & 500+ farmer producer organizations, serving 1.8 million farmers across 12 states. DeHatt was meant to solve the problem of understanding and testing the go-to-market strategy to increase women’s uptake and usage of advisory and insurance products by women in farming households in Uttar Pradesh.

Samunnati is one of India’s largest Agri-Tech non-banking financial companies and is building an open agitec network. It reached six million+ farmers across the 22 states in over 100 value chains. Sammunnati offered capacity-building support and working capital credit to women-led FPOs and village-level entrepreneurs in Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana to strengthen women’s intermediary channels.

Frontier Marketing, on the other hand, was a co-partner to Samunnati, and it is a social commercial platform for rural households operated through a network of women entrepreneurs. It works with 35,000+ digitalized rural women entrepreneurs serving 5000 villages and delivering 50 million solutions to rural doorsteps. Frontier marketing worked on promoting access and adoption of suitable agri-product bundles to women farmers through women village-level entrepreneurs in Uttar Pradesh.

Some of the learning agendas which were answered by the intervention included:

  1. The extent of success of A4W-supported partners in achieving scale, inclusion, and commercial sustainability.
  2. Main drivers of success and failure when creating product bundles for women smallholder farmers
  3. what it takes to enable the private sector to deliver products and offerings to women smallholder farmers at scale

Partner Success levels

Overall performance

DeHaat Success Achievement Level.

Samunnati and FM success achievement level

Drivers of success and Failure when Crediting product bundles for women smallholder farmers

What it take to enable the private sector to deliver products and offerings to women smallholder farmers at scale

For a detailed report, please download here