Women for Women: Strengthening the middle layer of Women Village Level Entrepreneurs (VLEs)

AgriFin harnesses the power of digital technology for women smallholder farmers (WSHFs) through a network of partnerships and smallholder farmers across 40 counties. In India, the focus was building digital financial inclusion for 100,000 women smallholder farmers, bundled with services to increase income and resilience in Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana. Previous ecosystem studies in India showed that WSHFs were met with several barriers to productivity and income. These included low access to and use of formal financial services, sociocultural barriers, operational challenges across the agricultural value chain, and limitations in women’s collectivization. The use of VLE was recommended as one of the ways through which women could be involved in empowering other women. Women village-level entrepreneurs are locally based, digitally skilled rural women influencers passionate about change. They connect rural communities by providing physical touchpoints for digital offerings in remote locations, building community relationships and trust

As such, targeting VLEs participation in distributing agricultural insurance and other bundled services and offering advisory services in the process proved to be revolutionary. This was seen as a means to break the sociocultural barriers, resolve operational challenges, improve access to formal financial services, and improve women’s collectivization. These would increase productivity and income for both women with VLE and WSHF.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of the potential of VLE to revolutionize the productivity and income of WSHF and WLVE, their capacities were found to be low. This underpinned A4W to commission a study to investigate the kind of product/service mix offering facilitated by VLE, which could increase the income of WSHFs by more than 25%, and how women VLE could deliver products and services in an economically viable manner to farmers’ households, including WSHFs. The study’s findings contributed immensely to the body of knowledge by using scientific approaches and leveraging three types of data sources: surveys, expert interviews, and secondary data. Some of the coping outcomes would include.

In the short term, the study recommended input packages of climate resilience seeds, fertilizers, crop advisory, credit and digitally-assisted payments with further income enhancer bundles of cattle feeds, additives, healthcare, credit and digitally-assisted payments. In the medium term, a drudgery comforter bundle was recommended, which included farm implement rental, advisory, credit and digitally assisted payments. Further, soil rejuvenator and harvest booster were instructed in the long run. While the soil rejuvenator included soil health monitoring, fertility and pesticides, credit and digitally-assisted payment, the Harvest Booster included food processing packaging, market aggregation, credit, and digitally-assisted payments. Additional support to extend these bundles to women farmers included providing women extension support, selling through women resellers or women VLEs, women-specific helplines and IVRS, women-friendly tech/app interfaces and women/family-based collaterals.

An Ideal W-VLE catering to women farmers should be an early adopter with a social network, entrepreneurial drive and moderate technical proficiency. The model of women VLEs has exhibited remarkable success across various facets of the rural ecosystems, including financial inclusion and bridging the digital divide. In the agricultural domain, women farmers also demonstrated a preference for obtaining agricultural inputs via women’s VLES

The main reasons for purchasing through VLEs include improved accessibility, established trust and the quality of the products offered by LVEs.

As such, for a successful implementation of the A4W project, understanding the most influential women VLEs model for women farmers and the support requirements to ensure their success is critical. These formed the foundation of the learning agender of this activity, which included

• which models of women VLEs is suitable for women farmers to extend Agri product and services
• what support is needed by women VLEs to help improve their income

Two VLE models influenced by the entrepreneurs’ involvement and support were identified. These were institutionally backed models and self-employed models. The degree of independence, capital and risk involvement for the entrepreneur are the building blocks of the difference between the two models. An institutionally backed VLE model is more relevant in cases of women VLE catering to women farmers with new product bundles. This is because of its ability to establish trust, be aided with technology and logistics support, be backed by a viable business model, provide consistent hand-holding to women VLEs to improve business acumen and provide institutional support in conducting farmer demonstrations to raise awareness about new product/service offering and the limited time investment required from the VLEs schedule.

Women’s VLE can be strengthened by providing a varied support system to sell new products, including practical training, time delivery of products, and a robust feedback loop. The need to profile early adopters of product bundles, availability of samples, effective promotion and communication of the benefits attached, and field demonstrations were just some of the support mentioned by VLEs as required. Similarly, identified bundles and support to VLEs could increase farmers’ income by 30% and offer women VLEs a viable revenue model. A pilot to capture insights on the extension of identified agri products to women farmers through W-VLEs was exercised as proof of concept.

Detailed report can be accessed here