Jiva was chosen to represent Indonesia and SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) - as a digital solution that helps the global community accelerate our progress in achieving zero hunger by 2030.
Ram presented how Jiva is helping smallholder farmers, who produce 70% of the world's food but are amongst the most hungry people in the world, by solving the multifaceted challenges they face every day: lack of access to technology, low level of digital literacy, unfair markets, and minimal opportunity to get financial services.
When we help solve these challenges, smallholder farmers will get better income and livelihoods - and when we make sure that the world's largest food producers are prosperous, we are on the fast track towards solving world hunger.
We are honoured to be a part of this noble mission of ensuring the achievement of sustainable development goals while making the world a little bit more equal for everyone.
Ruwatan is a Javanese tradition in which ceremonies are performed to repel bad luck and avoid misfortune. Villagers gather for a carnival, dancing to traditional music and parading around the village in costumes and giant papier-mâché crop varieties. For farmers, it is a cleansing ritual to wish for a bountiful harvest.
This year, Jiva supported one of our Sahabat Jiva (our partner micro-collector) in Jombang, Minadi, and his network of smallholder farmers to participate in a festive Ruwatan ceremony.
Let’s wish for their abundant harvest!
Being close to our farmers is very important for Jiva. Respecting and being involved in their tradition is our way to be an integral part of their community. It helps us get to know them better so we can find better ways to help them get better livelihoods.
Find out more about our mission to help uplift the livelihoods of smallholder farmers around the world by following us on LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube.
In his talk at the forum, in which over 100 CFOs and business leaders convened to share their experiences, learnings, and strategies that let them stay ahead of the game in their expertise, Ashish highlighted how he leveraged new technologies to optimise financial processes at Jiva
In his talk at the forum, in which over 100 CFOs and business leaders convened to share their experiences, learnings, and strategies that let them stay ahead of the game in their expertise, Ashish highlighted how he leveraged new technologies to optimise financial processes at Jiva.
“The use of No Code and AI in finance can definitely improve the efficiency and accuracy in financial processes, which can lead to better decision-making and, ultimately, business growth,” Ashish said, as he showed the instances of how Jiva utilises No Code or Text-to-Code, automation, and live finance modelling to the audience in Pullman Jakarta.
At Jiva, we ensure to demystify the complexity of AI, leap beyond its scary unknown, and leverage it as a helpful tool at our disposal.
Read more about how we leverage the latest technology to help smallholder farmers grow better crops and earn more income by following us on LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube.
Our partnership team, Jeffri Yokaswendra and Rachmad Hariotomo, presented to the Ministry what Jiva has been doing with the farming community in villages across seven provinces in Indonesia, and more specifically, the project that we recently piloted with Village-Owned Enterprises (BUMDes) in Central Java called “Jiva Village.”
As the Ministry has declared its support for the Jiva Village program, we are now preparing to sign an MoU to establish this partnership.
Jiva is happy to have all the support we can get to help us uplift the livelihoods of smallholder farmers across Indonesia and eventually around the world.
Joining forces with the government will advance our endeavours to reshape agriculture and empower farmers to adopt better agricultural practices and grow their income.
Earlier this month, our Chief Finance Officer for Jiva Indonesia, Ashish Agarwal, also signed a KUR loan agreement with Bank Mandiri in Makassar.
This agreement with two state-owned banks will help smallholder farmers access loans and grow their farms because they often face difficulties in obtaining loans due to, for instance, a lack of proximity to financial services.
The mission to empower smallholder farmers and help them improve their livelihoods is too heavy of rock to lift alone. That is why Jiva is happy to partner with people who share our dream to make the world a little more equal for our farmers.
Learn more about Jiva and our mission to help empower 500 million smallholder farmers by following us on LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube.
Jiva’s Head of Growth Seamus Tardif explains in the article the great challenge of technology adoption within the smallholder farming community, our “phygital” (blend of physical and digital) approach, and how Jiva is using the latest technology to help make farming a more prospective, sustainable occupation to ensure food security.
Read the full article here: https://www.theedgesingapore.com/digitaledge/digital-economy/solving-global-food-crisis-technology
Since rice is a staple food for most people in Asia, the upcoming major rice shortage will put the region’s food security at risk. The global rice market is set to log its largest shortfall in two decades in 2023, according to Fitch Solutions’ Country Risk and Industry Research dated April 4. This is due to the knock-on effect of the ongoing war in Ukraine and bad weather in rice-producing countries like China and Pakistan. Consequently, the price of rice will average US$17.30 ($22.90) per cwt through this year and is likely to ease to US$14.50 per cwt only in 2024. (Cwt is a unit of measurement for commodities such as rice.)
Yields of other crops are also expected to be affected due to food distribution, energy and fertiliser shortages. This is why the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2023 identifies the food supply crunch as one of the biggest risks to the world economy in the next two years.
Using technology to modernise agricultural processes and enable data-driven decisions is essential to securing our food supply. In fact, the International Food Policy Research Institute predicts that data-driven agriculture techniques can increase farm productivity by as much as 67% by 2050 while simultaneously cutting down on agricultural and food losses.
Yet, less than one-tenth of farmers in Asia are using or planning to use at least one agriculture technology (agritech or agtech) solution in the next two years.
Seamus Tardif, head of growth at Jiva — a Singapore-headquartered agritech company operating across Indonesia and India — agrees that smallholder farmers tend to be hesitant to adopt technology as they may not fully understand the value of digitalising farming practices. “The challenge may not always be a lack of smartphones or connectivity, which are of course huge challenges, but it may also be a lack of education that technology can be used to help with their farming needs. For instance, we see many farmers using YouTube and Google for entertainment but not education. They will still ask their neighbours what they think the weather will be like tomorrow. Because of this, we’ve taken a more phygital [physical and digital] approach to getting our services to villages,” he says.
Smallholder farmers, he adds, need social proof before deciding to use technology to transform how they work. “Every change could result in a possible loss of income or breaking of a long-term partnership with local businesses. [So, these farmers will be motivated to transform only when they] see many others around them also changing.
“Also, smallholder farmers are keen to witness the benefits they can expect before they embrace technology. [This is why Jiva] runs demo programmes and invests in village systems by running educational roadshows. In Indonesia, we’ve directly educated over 20,000 farmers through on-the-ground roadshows and established “Jiva Villages” that showcase our 360-degree services. As we proceed, we collect testimonials, such as farmers who doubled their yield and income by following Jiva’s advisory and utilising Jiva’s input and harvest services. We can then share these powerful stories with other farmers to help alleviate their concerns,” he explains.
According to The World Bank, most smallholder farmers live below the poverty line, subsisting on less than US$2 a day. “There are four main reasons for this: Restricted access to high-quality farming inputs, lack of capital at critical moments in the farming cycle, information asymmetry at the time of sale, and improper farming practices,” notes Tardif.
To address this, Jiva provides easy access to high-quality farming inputs, offers credit facilities for farming inputs, enables harvest to be bought at fair and transparent prices, and provides agronomy advisory services for free. “By improving their livelihoods, we believe we can inspire the next generation of farmers and make farming a more profitable and sustainable occupation for generations to come, [which could help strengthen] food security,” he says.
Tardif explains that Jiva operates in a phygital ecosystem. “On the physical side, we work with rural entrepreneurs (which are farmers, collectors, and village-level retailers) and supply chain partners. On the digital side, we have three customer-facing mobile apps — one for each customer group: Farmers, retailers, and collectors. Moreover, we have an extensive automated back-end system for managing transactions, risks, and analytics, which are also made available to our field teams through internally-facing mobile applications.”
Jiva’s farmer app offers agronomy advisory services that leverage machine visioning (which is the ability of a computer to “see” images) and artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver real-time crop diagnoses and treatment recommendations by simply taking a photo. It also provides market pricing on key commodities to help farmers make informed decisions on when to sell and the price they can expect to receive based on their crop. “We will soon release a new large language model-based advisory service that draws from our extensive agronomy knowledge base to allow farmers to ask a variety of questions beyond pest and disease management. To purchase farming inputs and get access to credit, farmers can connect with one of Jiva’s collectors or retailers,” he says.
Meanwhile, collectors can use Jiva’s collector app to purchase harvest, sell inputs, and perform credit know-your-customer checks easily. The retailer app gives retailers access to Jiva’s extensive range of high-quality farming inputs such as fertilisers and agricultural equipment.
For its back-end systems, Jiva uses a variety of tech platforms and automation to assist with the management of inventory, transactions, risk, and services to farmers, collectors, and retailers. “Our credit risk assessment tool utilises AI to identify the risk level of each credit request and determine if Jiva should or should not accept a particular cash-advance request. This assessment looks at various events leading up to the request to determine the legitimacy of the request and the likelihood of default, regardless of whether a collector/farmer has been given credit in the past. The aim is to reduce default rates to ensure we can maintain a sustainable credit/cash-advance system.
“We are also evolving our pricing systems to incorporate predictive pricing through machine learning. This will look at the multiple years of the pricing data we have access to across commodities, as well as the current pricing trends and other factors, to help provide a pricing estimate for our operations management team to use to set our daily prices,” states Tardif.
In a recent survey of more than 200 respondents in Indonesia and India, farmers and collectors who leveraged Jiva’s services saw their income increase by 25%. Farmers who used Jiva’s agronomy advisory also increased their yields by up to 49%.
“Additionally, we have heard across multiple sources that Jiva’s commodity prices are now the benchmark of prices across our operating areas. This means that even those farmers who aren’t working directly with Jiva benefit from Jiva being in the ecosystem. We have worked hard to improve efficiencies in the agricultural supply chain and reduce the possibility of bad actors inflating margins, which has resulted in more value being driven back to the farmer,” shares Tardif.
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Our Chief Technology Officer, Tejas Dinkar, explains how our field teams, with our network of farmers and agronomy experts, collected and annotated hundreds of thousands of images from the ground to train the AI model to identify crop pests and diseases and how to treat them.
Read the full article here.
By Eileen Yu, ZDNET Senior Contributing Editor
Organizations that want to harness generative artificial intelligence (AI) more effectively should use their own data to train AI systems, using foundation models as a starting point.
Doing so can provide more relevant context and allay concerns about the potential risks, such as inaccuracy and intellectual property infringements.
Accuracy, in particular, is a top priority for a company such as Jiva. The agritech vendor uses AI to power its mobile app, Crop Doctor, which identifies crop diseases via image processing and computer vision, and recommends treatments. It also taps AI to determine the credit worthiness of farmers who ask for cash advancements prior to a harvest and returns the loans when their harvest pays out.
It uses various AI and machine-learning tools, including Pinecorn, OpenAI, and scikit-learn, as well as Google's TensorFlow and Vertex AI. Jiva has operations in Singapore, Indonesia, and India.
It trains its AI models on thousands of annotated images for each disease, according to Jiva's CTO Tejas Dinkar. The agritech company has collected hundreds of thousands of images from the ground through its field teams and farmers who are part of Jiva's network and use its app AgriCentral, which is available in India.
Its field experts are involved in the initial collection and annotation of images, before these are passed on to agronomy experts who further annotate the images. These then are added to the training model used to identify plant disease.
For new crops or crops that its team of experts are less familiar with, Jiva brings in other platforms, such as Plantix, which have extensive datasets to power image recognition and diagnosis information.
It uses various AI and machine-learning tools, including Pinecorn, OpenAI, and scikit-learn, as well as Google's TensorFlow and Vertex AI. Jiva has operations in Singapore, Indonesia, and India.
It trains its AI models on thousands of annotated images for each disease, according to Jiva's CTO Tejas Dinkar. The agritech company has collected hundreds of thousands of images from the ground through its field teams and farmers who are part of Jiva's network and use its app AgriCentral, which is available in India.
Its field experts are involved in the initial collection and annotation of images, before these are passed on to agronomy experts who further annotate the images. These then are added to the training model used to identify plant disease.
For new crops or crops that its team of experts are less familiar with, Jiva brings in other platforms, such as Plantix, which have extensive datasets to power image recognition and diagnosis information.
Where there is a lack of robust AI models, humans can step back in.
For rare or highly specific crop issues, Dinkar noted that Jiva's team of agronomy experts can work with local researchers and field teams to resolve them.
The company's credit assessment team also overlays data generated by the AI systems with other information, he said. For example, the team may make an on-site visit and realize a crop is just recently ready for harvest, which the AI-powered system may not have taken into consideration when it generated the credit assessment.
"The objective is not to remove humans entirely, but to move them to areas they can amplify and [apply] adaptive thoughts, which machines aren't yet up to," Dinkar said.
Asked about challenges Jiva encountered with its generative AI adoption, he pointed to the lack of a standard prompt methodology across difference software versions and providers.
"True omni-lingualism" also is missing in LLMs, he said, while hallucination remains a key issue.
"Various large language models all have their own quirks [and] the same prompt techniques do not work across these," he explained. For instance, through refined prompt engineering, Jiva has been able to instruct its agronomy bot to clarify if it is unable to infer, from context, the crop that the farmer is referencing.
However, while this particular prompt performed well on GPT-3.5, it did not do as well on GPT-4, he said. It also does not work on a different LLM.
"The inability to reuse prompts across versions and platforms necessitates the creation of bespoke sets of prompt techniques for each one," Dinkar said. "As tooling improves and best practices emerge for prompting various large language models, we hope cross-platform prompts will become a reality."
Improvements are also needed in cross-language support, he said, pointing to strange responses that its chatbot sometimes generates that are out of context.
Singapore has carved out dedicated cloud resources so its government agencies can deploy artificial intelligence (AI) applications more efficiently and securely.
The cloud cluster has been established with the aim of driving up AI adoption in the public sector and supporting research into how AI can be applied, said the Smart Nation and Digital Government Office (SNDGO). It will also support local AI startups, according to the government agency.
Called the AI Government Cloud Cluster, the platform runs within a dedicated environment on Google Cloud, where the U.S. vendor's AI technology stack and partner applications are available for deployment. These resources include A2 supercomputers running on Nvidia's A100 GPUs and a repository of AI models, running first- and second-party as well as open source platforms, which government agencies can customize for their specific requirements. The AI models span multi-language text translation, audio-to-text conversion, and software coding.
Several global "shifts" have underscored the need for a new approach to technology, with AI and cloud playing key roles, according to Chan Cheow Hoe, SNDGO's government CTO and senior advisor for the Singapore Economic Development Board.
Speaking at the Google summit, Chan pointed to environment and technology changes and said people now want to know the impact digitalization has on the environment and on their personal security. More people are exposed to cybersecurity risks and investors want to see results, with businesses having to work harder for every dollar.
There are more significant trust and safety concerns compared to a couple of years ago, where fewer people cared about these issues, he said. There is also zero tolerance for downtime, where online services and apps that go down for an hour will make headlines.
With technology now omnipresent and touching every facet of daily life, Chan stressed the need to safeguard customers and citizens and ensure systems and services are trusted -- otherwise no one will want to use the technology.
There have also been big technological shifts and he pointed to cloud, alongside SaaS (software-as-a-service), and generative AI as the key ones that hold significance.
Heralding the Singapore government's cloud journey, which began seven years ago, Chan said the move was important not just for cost efficiencies, but also to provide access to a global ecosystem of the best technology resources. Organizations that do not open up to the cloud also risk running bespoke applications that might not be able to scale quickly and support faster times to market, he added.
However, many organizations remain straddled with legacy systems, including Singapore's public sector, according to Chan. There is also a dearth of relevant IT capabilities, without which the journey toward digital transformation will be difficult.
In addition, policies need to catch up to an environment that is increasingly powered by the cloud, he said. Unless Singapore adopts a progressive attitude toward policies, brings in the best talent, and gets rid of legacy systems, any step forward could mean another two steps back.
This situation creates a compelling case to do something new, Chan said, pointing to the government's efforts to boost AI and cloud adoption. He said a new iteration of GCC will be equipped with higher security measures to enable more confidential and critical workloads to be moved to the cloud infrastructure.
Agritech company Jiva is also taking these kinds of precautions in its adoption of AI, including generative AI. Its mobile app recently introduced a new feature, called Crop Doctor, which lets farmers load images of crops to diagnose diseases and recommend relevant treatments that can be tailored to their requirements.
Asked if the company had concerns about tapping generative AI amid the reported security issues, Jiva's head of business strategy and partnership Aditya Thareja acknowledged there were worries about the potential risks. "We want to ensure things like hallucinations [occurring] are reduced to a small percentage. The last thing you want is to provide the wrong advice to farmers," Thareja said during a media briefing on the sidelines of the summit.
Jiva, which has operations in Singapore, Indonesia, and India, built Crop Doctor on Google's Vertex AI, tapping computer vision and image processing to identify crop diseases and causes, such as potassium deficiency. It recommends treatments based on an in-house data library
To mitigate potential risks, Thareja said the large language AI model is trained on only data that is sourced and vetted by Jiva. The generative AI model does not scour public data from the internet, he stressed, adding that the company continuously finetunes the prompt-engineering capability to ensure the right answers are provided.
Crop Doctor was tested on WhatsApp with 25,000 farmers before the feature was launched on Android in Indonesia, where the mobile OS has the highest penetration. Jiva currently has 125,000 farmers on its registry in the Asian market.
An earlier iteration, called Crop Care, also provides treatment recommendations based on crop images, but does not customize these results based on a farmer's specific access to the required components.
According to Jiva, Crop Doctor currently clocks an accuracy rate of above 90% for common major crop diseases, if the picture is in focus and the subject matter is correctly identified. The agritech vendor told ZDNET it continues to collect images from real-world cases from farmers to further improve the accuracy rate.
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AgriCentral focuses on delivering useful and intuitive features to the millions of farmers who have already downloaded the app, including price comparison and tracking tools, accurate weather and weather forecasting, and agriculture-focused forum where farmers can discuss issues and get expert help, and much more. AgriCentral harnesses state of the art technologies such as global positioning, satellite imagery, big data analytics, machine learning, and image analytics to usher farmers into the era of digital farming.
AgriCentral has thus far exhibited impressive growth in the Indian market and continues to deliver value to its users. We look forward to close collaboration with AgriCentral in the months and years to come!
Check out AgriCentral’s features:
Market View: Over 5,000 price-points, the largest in the market, to provide farmers with daily price information for a variety of crops, right on their phones.
Crop Care: A combination of image identification and symptom based diagnosis to help farmers understand which pests, diseases or deficiencies are present among their crops.
Bulletin: Bulletin is a one-stop shop for all agricultural and agri-business related news. Farmers can stay updated with local, national and global developments, as well as the latest government schemes.
Farm Voice: A question-and-answer, forum-style platform that allows farmers to interact with both their peers from across the country and Agri experts for resolution of agronomical queries.
Crop Plan: With just a sow date and crop type, CropPlan gives farmers a personalised calendar of activities to be done to get a better yield at a lower cost.
Weather Forecast: Accurate daily weather forecast with hourly breakdown and intuitive display of relevant agricultural data, such as rainfall and humidity. The feature includes a 15-day forecast to aid farmers in planning and execution of critical farm activities.
AgriSense: AgriSense allows farmers to seamlessly search for specific products and quantities and create orders. Farmers can then review offers and connect with sellers to close the deal.
Learn more about AgriCentral by visiting their website or LinkedIn
Interested in Jiva? Follow us on Linkedin and Twitter or reach out at hello@jiva.ag
Why does Jiva provide financing to farmers?
Jiva provides financing to farmers because many factors that hold smallholder farmers below the poverty line derive from a lack of access to fair, low-cost financing. Provision of capital to a farmer allows them to reinvest in the farm through the purchase of high-quality supplies, branded chemicals, and critical fertilisers.
We found through our research in many rural farming communities, from India to Indonesia to West Africa, that the problems begin when the farmer does not have the cash they need to purchase supplies for their farm. Between payment from the previous cycle and the beginning of the next, earnings have been spent supporting family and community needs. Now, the farmer must rely on traditional banks, who are unlikely to be present in the community and unlikely to lend without proper documentation, or on local traders, who often charge exorbitant rates.
The farmer is then forced to go with the local trader. They elect to buy low-quality supplies in order to spend as little as possible to avoid more charges. The low-quality supplies yield a meager harvest and damage the soil, reducing the farmers' profit. In order to make ends meet, the farmer takes out another loan. They unknowingly enter a cycle of debt.
At Jiva, we aim to break this cycle by providing financing, in the form of digital “advances” to our farmers. Once a farmer signs up and is verified through Jiva’s app-based approval system, Jiva adds an advance amount to the farmer’s profile. The farmer can then only use that advance at Jiva’s e-commerce store, which stocks and delivers trusted, brand-name seeds and other supplies. The low- or no-cost advances allow the farmer to “buy now, pay later” without the exorbitant rates. At harvest, the Jiva Agent simply deducts the amount used for inputs from the total price of the harvest.
Our system of digital, non-fungible financing ensures that funds meant for the farm are used only for farm supplies, that those supplies are trusted, and that farmers avoid exorbitant rates that can quickly lead to financial hardship.
What’s next?
Jiva is constantly reviewing the designs, features, and delivery methods of our products. As we continue to extend advances to farmers across South Sulawesi, we remain committed to speaking directly with our users and Jiva Agents, improving our products and services, and creating value for millions of farmers around the world.
Interested in Jiva? Follow us on Linkedin and Twitter or reach out at hello@jiva.ag
Pak Saripuddin typically grows ~3 metric tonnes of corn on his 1 hectare field each cycle. After one season of following Jiva’s practical, feasible and personalized advice, he was able to grow 9.5 metric tonnes of corn.
To put that in perspective, that’s an entire year’s income earned in a single season!
Pak Saripuddin spoke with Jiva about his experience using the application, trying new practices, and adopting new behaviours. Like hundreds of farmers we’ve spoken with, Pak Saripuddin relied on agronomic advice from his peers. This is a common practice for many reasons, one of which is the lack of access to information about farming that is personalised to their crops maturity, easy to understand and feasible for smallholder farmers to adopt within their financial and labor limitations. Jiva’s advice, which focuses on micro-interventions throughout the season that lead to big improvements at harvest, were simple and doable. Though reluctant to change his common practices, including seed type, row spacing, and how to treat certain pests effectively, he’s ultimately glad he did.
Pak Saripuddin’s results are incredible, but they are not uncommon in underserved communities, where small changes can lead to enormous improvements. Imagine what would happen if the 500 million+ smallholder farmers around the world had access to Jiva’s advisory, financing and logistics services. Imagine how food systems, communities, and lives could change for the better.
Interested in Jiva? Follow us on Linkedin and Twitter or reach out at hello@jiva.ag
Here’s how it works:
The results
We conducted demo plot experiments with 135 individual farmers across 5 regencies, all with approximately 1 hectare of land. We did not control for many factors, including elevation, land slope and environmental factors such as drought and flooding.
We’re thrilled to say that preliminary data from these demo plots shows that 85% of our farmers increased their yield, with an average increase of over 40%! These are unprecedented figures, particularly from experiments in semi-controlled environments. From reinvesting in the land to paying off cyclical debt and even sending children to school, 40% is life-changing.
Interested in Jiva? Follow us on Linkedin and Twitter or reach out at hello@jiva.ag
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This result, after a single operating season, is unprecedented for a new entrant in a trust-based market where traditional relationships trump newcomers and human interactions are favoured over digital interfaces. We believe this achievement indicates that Jiva’s hybrid human-technology delivery model is working and that our users and agents find value in our products.
How does Jiva differ from traditional harvest buying?
Jiva differs from traditional methods of harvest purchase in several key ways. Read on to learn more:
Interested in Jiva? Follow us on Linkedin and Twitter or reach out at hello@jiva.ag
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Over three growing seasons, Jiva grew from an unknown entity to commanding an average 30% market share in our target regencies.
● We conducted hundreds of hours of user interviews.
● We met with political leaders, spoke at global innovation summits, and were recognized by name in Singapore’s national budget address.
● We studied the effects of our advice on over 100 farmers and found that 85% saw an increase in yield, with an average increase of 40% per farmer.
● We reviewed, rebuilt, and shipped an entirely new app to better support our agents.
We did the math and found that in just one year, we…
● Purchased 42 MILLION kilograms of maize
● Paid US$14 MILLION to farmers for their crops
● Provided over US$2 MILLION in low-cost financing to nearly 8,000 farmers
…And we’re just getting started on our journey to re-imagine agricultural and food systems and empower hundreds of millions of farmers around the world. We look forward to carrying our momentum into 2022 and beyond.
Interested in Jiva? Follow us on Linkedin and Twitter or reach out at hello@jiva.ag
Christine Tan (CT): You have steered Olam through many crises. When you look at the fallout in commodity prices. How would you compare the impact the agri-food industry is feeling from the current pandemic?
Sunny Verghese (SV): This is clearly for me the worst crisis that I’ve faced in my lifetime. The crisis has four clear shocks. The first, obviously, is the health shock. The problem with the health shock is that there is so much unknown. The probabilities are very uncertain. The outcomes are unbounded. So, it is very difficult to model and do any kind of scenario planning. So, our first priority is towards protecting the safety and lives of our employees. We have 89,000 people in 67 countries. So, our first focus priority is to keep them safe.
The second is really to make sure that we’re able to service our customers in a safe and healthy way for all the food, ingredients, feed and fiber products that they need. The second big shock that we see is demand shock. Fortunately, 85 percent of our portfolio is in food and feed ingredients, and that is very recession proof. People have got to eat even in a recession. Therefore, we have been quite fortunate in terms of our sector and our business of not having a significant demand erosion that we see in some of the other sectors. However, within that, the feeding regions that we are supplying to which goes to out of home consumption or dining consumption vigils and restaurants and quick service restaurants of full-service restaurants or cafes, those have clearly come off. We also see demand for discretionary food items quite subdued. But the center of the plate food items — the food that is essential like food staples — demand is actually going up because of pantry restocking effect at the consumer household level and at the retailers as well.
The third shock that we are contending with is the supply side shock in our industry. In our industry, that is a bigger shock than the demand shock, and that is because of the forced lockdowns and the regulatory restrictions. We have many supply chain disruption impacts. So, we find it difficult to get labor for our farming and upstream operations. We find it difficult to get labor for our logistics, manufacturing and factory operations. Therefore, our production is not at full capacity in many of these countries, although we have been saved from some of the worst aspects of supply chain disruption because our industry and our operations in many of these countries are deemed to be essential. Therefore, we were given the permission to operate through the crisis. But we had logistics issues, labor-related issues and other things that disrupted our supply chain.
The final shock is really the financial market shock, with credit to smallholder farmers, provision of inputs to smallholder farmers — and this is the Northern Hemisphere’s main planting season — those were substantially dislocated as well. So, cost of credit for smallholder farmers has gone up significantly, the availability of credit has come down, and all of these financial market accelerants including currency devaluations — many of these countries have suffered significant currency devaluations, whether it’s in Brazil, whether it is in Nigeria, Ghana and many parts of Asia as well — that has meant for imported food, price inflation has occurred. Therefore, consumers are finding it difficult to afford food. Just to give you an example, Africa alone, 150 million people have lost jobs during this crisis. Each of them supports a household size of four to five dependents, which means we have about 600 to 750 million people who have completely lost their jobs or significantly reduced the amount of time that they can really work. 60 to 80 percent of their consumption expenditure of these folks are in food consumption… are allocated to food consumption and therefore, increase in food prices as a result of currency devaluation and the supply chain disruptions has resulted in many of them having to eat less calories than they used to or eat less nutritious foods.
Also, you’ve seen in some parts of this in many parts of emerging Asia and Africa, schools have been completely closed and locked down. In many parts of Africa, children get their only meal as known day school meal program and that that has also got discontinued. And many of the children are now under the threat of having to go back and work on farms. So, child labor issues are going to increase.
CT: In your mind, Sunny, is the world now seeing a global food crisis as a result of the pandemic?
SV: The world is well supplied in terms of food. But the accessibility of that food, the affordability of that food, the food being wasted are the bigger issues. That is why we are worried that in developing economies and in emerging economies where people are losing their jobs and there isn’t a job support program like in the developed world to protect their incomes. In many of these countries, if they don’t earn their daily wages, they have no way of eating on that particular day. They are daily wage earners, they are in the frontline. If they don’t get paid and they don’t get to have work on that day, they can hardly feed. So, if you look at the World Food Programme, they have now estimated that at the end of 2019, we had 135 million people around the world who are at the level C stage of food insecurity, which means they can only survive if there is some external food assistance. Because of the COVID pandemic, they have now estimated there’s another 130 million people added to the level C stage of food insecurity. So, the health pandemic has now become a hunger pandemic because people are not able to access the food which is in plentiful supply but not able to reach them or they can’t afford it.
CT: What lessons did you learn that helped you respond quickly to the Coronavirus pandemic?
SV: Because the epidemiology on this virus is still being discovered as we speak, whether it is going to be airborne is the question. Is it aerosol? Is it droplets? We thought it was only droplets. Now we’re talking about aerosol. So, I think there are many things about this virus that we don’t know. What is clear is that people have to take individual responsibility, and how do we educate people who we can’t reach — the farmers in a lot of the countries that we operate? In the past, we had an army of extension officers on the ground who could go and visit them and personally train and educate them on good agricultural practices. But now, with the social distancing requirements and the inability to meet people in groups, we have to really innovate and try and do this by digitizing precautionary conditions that the communities in these countries have to observe in terms of safe distancing or wearing masks or hand washing and providing them this stuff, because there isn’t masks, gloves, hand sanitizers or obviously hospital facilities, or availability of ventilators, so Olam has worked very hard in identifying the vulnerable areas within our supply chains. We have spent almost $6 million now to provide protective equipment, to use our digital tools and mechanisms to train and educate farmers, households and their communities. We’ve reached about 560,000 farmers, despite all of these lockdowns and restrictions to help them understand how to be safe. That, I think, has been the biggest impact that we have been able to create within our supply chains, within the farmers and villages that we work in.
CT: Among the regions that you operate in, Africa is obviously one of the worst hit during his pandemic reporting one of the highest increases in new infections. Olam sources commodities like coffee, cocoa, cashew, even rice in plantations across western and east Africa. What’s the status of your operations there?
SV: We operate in about 24 countries in Africa. Our first focus is to help the most vulnerable parts of the population, to get them food. We want to amplify and supplement the efforts of the World Food Programme to provide our farming communities and suppliers food on time for them to have a nutritious meal. We are seeing how we can plug in and play an important role by leveraging our reach and our relationship with these farmers in these rural communities. So, that is the first thing.
The second is we want to make sure that the farmers get the production inputs they need, because this is the crux of the planting season, the height of the planting season, and they need access to fertilizers, improved seeds and varieties. They need agronomic advice. They need crop protection chemicals. You’ll see that one million acres have been lost in East Africa as a result of a locust infestation -and the locust swarm which has significantly impacted food production in that part of the world.
The third is really labor availability because many of the workers are not able to come and work on the farms. So, how can we help them mechanize or improve the productivity so that they can cope with that situation. Market access is a big problem because the factories are shut. Many of them are wasting the produce because it cannot reach a factory or there is no off-take in the factory. So, how do we provide storage or how do we help off-take the produce of the farmers producing, even if it is not going to be a commodity that Olam deals in, but can we provide a solution in terms of market off-take to the farmer. The farmers are struggling to access credit at this point in time because of Covid, so how do we help provide microfinance and credit to the farmers? So, these are some of the things that we have to focus in terms of the immediate actions that need to be taken, and we are leveraging our configuration of assets, people and reach to make an impact in all of these areas.
CT: Let’s talk more about labor, and you brought it up as well. There are reports that a pandemic has caused a labor shortage and that in turn is impacting crop harvest. To what extent is this affecting the yields at your farms? Are you seeing a lot of these farmers dump their crops because yields are so low?
SV: So, in fresh produce as well as in fresh livestock production, you’re seeing farmers having to actually dump stocks because the abattoirs are closed, the meat processing facilities are closed, or the fruit processing facilities are shut down or closed. So, in many countries, there is an increased food loss as a result of lack of demand or as a result of supply chain disruptions with factories and logistics being shut down. So, that is definitely happening in many parts of the world. Definitely, it is accentuated or amplified in Africa. So, keeping the supply chains open and helping keep the supply chains open is critical.
Let me give you one quick example. In Ethiopia, in our coffee supply chains, farmers or labor who come to pick the coffee are now expecting their wages to be at least doubled because food prices in that locality — because some of the food has to be imported and not locally produced and with what is happening to currency, etc. — the local prices of that food have gone up significantly. So, they are saying that unless their wages go up, we can’t even afford to eat. If we can’t afford to eat, we cannot come to work. So, you can see that there are ramifications in terms of how all of these interconnect and we have to provide a holistic solution and support for the farmers. But let’s get to the first milestone of getting the global community to support Africa in providing what the World Bank is saying is the $115 billion dollars that is required because they don’t have job support programs. So, if people are out of jobs, they are out of work, they are out of wage, they can’t eat or feed their households.
CT: We know that Olam is the world’s largest or leading raw cashew nut trader. When you look at a pandemic, it has caused havoc on demand. Border closures have simply meant that major buyers from Asia can’t travel to West Africa. How much pressure is this having on cashew prices? Is cashew farming now becoming unprofitable?
SV: Cashew prices have definitely declined. Even before the crisis, it was declining because of excess supply. The crisis has sort of accentuated it. Prices are still at about the cost of production levels. But definitely, farmer profitability has significantly come down as a result of much lower cashew prices. Demand for cashews is being impacted only at the margins, not major substantive decline in demand, but it is more the supply chain disruption issues and its excess supply that was there before the crisis, that the overhang continues. As a result, prices are lower.
CT: Olam is also one of the world’s largest coffee traders as well. Before the pandemic, coffee prices were already at record lows. Now, with the pandemic, cafes are shut, restaurants are shut. To what extent has this exacerbated the coffee crisis? Are you seeing more coffee farms go out of business?
SV: Coffee prices at these levels in many countries are below the cost of production. Brazil, which is the world’s largest coffee producer and the marginal cost producer, although coffee prices came down, the Brazilian real devalued considerably. As a result, in U.S. dollar terms, the Brazilian farmer as a result of the Brazilian real depreciation is still able to make money. But on the demand side, as you mentioned earlier because some part of coffee consumption is out-of-home consumption in restaurants or cafes like Starbucks or Costas or whatever, the lockdown and the shutdown of out-of-home consumption in restaurants and cafes has come down, have definitely impacted the demand for coffee.
CT: How much pain are coffee farms feeling at the moment?
SV: In many parts of the world, including other parts of Latin America and even in Asia, coffee prices today are below our farmers’ cost of production and therefore, we will see a reaction from the growers and the farmers of applying less fertilizers or taking less care of the crop. Therefore, we will see a cyclical downturn in production and we will see, therefore, coffee prices, once the global crisis is out of the way and demand, is restored cyclically then it adjusts itself. But at this point in time, coffee farmers around the world are suffering because their cost of production in many cases is higher than the current coffee prices.
CT: Are you doing everything at Olam to keep them in business?
SV: Yes, significantly. I can give you many examples: D.R.C., the Democratic Republic of Congo — we ordinate and source some specialty coffees and we have a cooperative for our specialty coffee called Virunga in one of the remote areas in DRC where we have 11 hundred women workers working in our factory there. We have increased their wages by 25 percent, and that is higher than anybody else in the industry. We are providing them free meals and we are providing them a clean safe working environment with all of the clothing precautions that we need to offer. Similarly, in another region of DRC as well, we are supporting 11 hundred coffee farmers. I’m just giving you some examples, but we are doing this at scale. We are reaching more than 560,000 farmers in various countries with various Covid support programs and packages to help them, their families and those communities.
CT: Sunny, you know, I love my chocolate and Olam is the world’s third largest processor when it comes to cocoa. When you look at the pandemic and how things have really taken an impact on supply chain, your customers include some of the world’s top makers of bulk chocolate, has the pandemic brought down chocolate consumption?
SV: Chocolate in some sense, is also comfort food, so people during crises in the past actually consumed more chocolate. But this time, what we’re seeing is because of the lockdown, for example, the airports are all shut down. People buy a lot of chocolates at the airport as gifts when they travel. So, we can see that demand for chocolates in the recent past has soften compared to many years of strong consumption growth. We see some softness in demand as a result, mainly of shut down. Retailers were shut down, so people can’t go and buy chocolates as easily as they could do before the lockdown. All of these things are happening, which has resulted in demand coming down in the recent past, actually, in the latter half of this crisis. In the first half of this crisis, we still had fairly solid demand. But as the lockdowns took hold across the globe, it offered less opportunities for consumers to indulge in their favorite pastime of eating chocolates, and we can see that the impact of some restrained demand in the recent past on chocolate consumption.
CT: Whether it’s cocoa, cashew or coffee, where do you see overall demand? You say right now it is pretty constant, but do you worry that in future, if the pandemic continues to drag on, it might start to hurt the purchasing power of the very consumers you’re trying to sell to?
SV: I think that will vary from country to country and the economic situation in each of these countries and what kind of COVID support packages are there. So, in the developed world, even if people are out of jobs, they’re given a job support program-package which allows them to maintain basic lifestyle in terms of consumption, et cetera. But in many countries where they can’t afford it, that is where the bigger crisis is. We are seeing very, very strong demand across our food staples portfolio. So, our wheat flour business, our pasta business, our rice business. So, across the food staples, we are seeing extremely strong demand. We are seeing good demand in our dairy business. We’re seeing very strong demand in our spices business. We are seeing quite strong demand even in the cocoa business so far — pretty strong demand and that business has done very well for us in the first quarter. We are going to be announcing our results soon. We are in a quiet period, so I can’t talk specifically about our results, but we have given an update at the end of the first quarter, a business update, and you can see that the cocoa business did well in that first quarter. 80, 85 percent of our portfolio is doing quite well. More of the industrial raw materials is where we have seen demand more significantly impacted. So, our cotton business, which is the fiber business, which is an industrial raw material going to textile industry, the textile mills have been closed down in many parts of the world. As a result, the capacity utilization rates in the textile industry has come down and that means demand for cotton fiber has come down, from a normal demand of 120 million bales per annum. This year, we expect the demand to come down to about 105 million bales, which is a significant contraction in demand. We see a contraction in demand for our rubber business, which is a de-prioritized business which we are planning to exit during this period. Rubber demand has come down because automobile demand has come down so tire demand has come down and therefore, rubber demand has come down. But in the food products, demand has only been affected where there is a big out-of-home consumption component or it is a very discretionary impulse purchase product. So, if it is a discretionary impulse purchase category, then demand is a little bit more impacted. If that is a significant segment of the consumption that goes into out-of-home consumption, then demand is also impacted there.
CT: So, in short, people really still need to eat and that’s why demand is still there for you. But when you look at your customers, are they starting to source more domestically and locally because of the supply issues? Are they changing where they get ingredients from?
SV: Yes, you’ve hit a very important point and that is happening. But I have to say that that trend, which I call de-globalization trend, was beginning to take shape even before Covid, primarily triggered by the trade war or the trade wars between the U.S. and China, between the U.S. and Europe, and the increased protectionist measures that different countries, as a result of the trade war, were beginning to start imposing tariffs and counter tariffs. So, we were already seeing a trend toward de-globalization and therefore many, many customers were trying to sharpen or near shore the supply chains rather than have offshore supply chains and particularly having full dependency or high dependency on one origin or one country to source their requirements from.
So, we already had seen that trend, but Covid has dramatically catalyzed that. We believe that post-Covid, that trend will accelerate, of people saying that we have been focused in designing our supply chains for cost efficiency and optimizing these supply chains for cost but we can’t do that any longer. We have to optimize the supply chains for resiliency and not only efficiency, but reliability and resiliency. So, we are seeing a big shift in efforts of customers to shorten supply chains. Even in the food sector, you can see many countries are saying that we can’t be dependent on our food consumption from far, faraway imports, because in this crisis, 14 countries imposed food export restrictions which accounted for roughly four percent of global calorie consumption was impacted by export restrictions that many countries put during the Covid crisis at the beginning of the crisis. Many of them are now unwounded, but that impacted food prices as well.
Therefore, consuming countries are saying that we have to have buffer stocks, we should arm upon resilience and we should have more security of food supply. We should produce more locally. You can see that the Singapore government now has a plan of producing 30 percent of its food by 2030. Similarly, many countries are saying that we cannot depend on hundred percent of our food requirements from imports and from faraway supply chains given these kinds of developments. So, de-globalization is going to be a trend that is going to continue for this as well.
CT: I know you’re in a quiet period, so you can’t talk about earnings, but as a global agri-food giant, you have a good pulse on the global economy. What’s your sense of when a recovery will take place? When do you expect things to start normalizing again?
SV: So, as I said at the beginning, Christine, this is a problem, statistically speaking, with unknown probabilities and unbounded outcomes. So, nobody knows whether we will have a big second wave, as is expected in the first quarter of next year at the height of winter. Because of what we are seeing in terms of the resurgence of cases in many, many countries, it’s still the first wave. Because of unknown probabilities, unbounded outcomes, it’s very difficult for anybody to forecast.
My own personal view is quite a bearish view. I think the economy is being propped up and supported by unprecedented monetary and fiscal support that is being provided by many governments that can afford it and that is what’s keeping the economy afloat at this point in time. So, the question is, why are asset prices in terms of stocks and other asset prices going up the way they are going up if the real economy, as you see from the IMF updated forecasts in July, they have revised the forecast down by almost 2 percentage points, 1.9 percentage point, and saying that the global economy this year will contract 4.9 percent, with the advanced economies contracting 8 percent and the developing economies, emerging economies are contracting about 3 percent.
CT: Are you saying the worst is yet to come?
SV: I am saying that we came down in this pandemic as far as the economy is concerned, we rode it down on an elevator, but we are going to recover climbing back the stairs. I do not believe that there’s going to be a V-shaped recovery. I think our recovery will be patchy. It’ll be uncertain and prolonged.
CT: As chairman of the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, what are you doing to build a more reliable and more stable food system that can weather sharp knocks and sharp breaks in the supply chain due to events like COVID?
SV: So, the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, as you know, WBCSD is a CEO-led coalition. We have about 200+ CEOs from across the world, across sectors as members, and we are trying to usher in a transition to a more sustainable one. One of the big trends that started pre-Covid but which will accelerate post-COVID is the move towards becoming more sustainable. I think there is a heightened sensibility that the way we did business in the past is not going to serve us going forward. We have to do more with less. So, coming to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, we are trying to achieve systems transformation across six meta systems. One is climate and energy. The second is waste and circular economy. The third is food and nature. The fourth is mobility, particularly urban mobility and urbanization. The fifth is about the people and the future of work. And the sixth is about redefining value: how we measure value and performance in companies because what we measure is what we manage. So, we are trying to achieve systems transformation across these six areas which we believe will help us meet our purpose of ushering in a transition to a more sustainable one.
CT: So, you’re saying that COVID has accelerated the sustainability agenda?
SV: Dramatically catalyzed and changed the sustainability agenda. Our membership has never been stronger than right where we are — the commitment that the member companies have towards contributing and pivoting significantly as a result of Covid. Covid has definitely catalyzed that. This is one of the big trends that is going to accelerate post-Covid. And our companies are now bringing the action gap between what they have announced as goals and really taking concrete action to achieve the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals within the planetary boundaries framework, recognizing that the three biggest challenges that confront us this century is climate emergency, the biodiversity collapse and the growing inequality. Also, we are seeing digitalization as another big, big trend. Accessing farmers in remote areas, smallholder farmers doing it only physically through an army of field agents, we are now found innovative digital ways of reaching the farmer. We are developing something called an agronomy nudge brain, which advises the farmer through remote sensing technology — each individual farmer on what is the next best action that he can take on his farm. This is using machine learning and delivered digitally to him, but because the farmer does not read, etc., it is all through a voice brain informing the farmer or a visual instruction to help the farmer take the next best action on this farm on that particular day. So, I think there is a dramatic digitalization revolution that is happening in our sector and globally across sectors.
CT: At the start of the pandemic, Olam embarked on a restructuring exercise where you’re essentially going to split the businesses into two operating units. Is the pandemic causing a distraction for you in your reorganization efforts?
SV: We have announced where we are splitting the company into two distinct operating entities. One called Agri Food Ingredients which consists of on trend food ingredients which are natural, sustainable, traceable, that is cocoa, coffee, edible nuts, spices, dairy. Another distinctly different entity, Olam Global Agri which is all about providing the food, feed and fiber requirements to a growing population, particularly in emerging markets in Asia, Latin America and Africa, leveraging on our traditional strengths of origination, processing, farming, et cetera. So, we believe that we will be able to get the right kind of investors or interested in these two themes which are complementary but different. Therefore, by making the business simple, more focused and less complex, the investors we hope to bring on board to invest in these two entities will re-rate the company and we will be able to raise additional capital to take these two entities to full potential. So, we are on track. We are following a sequenced stage-gated approach and implementing this. So, the first issue was for us to re-segment the business into these groups. The second stage is to reorganize in terms of the operating model design and the organizational design. We are well into that at this point in time. The third phase will be carving these two businesses out. The fourth and final phase will be to IPO these businesses or to list these businesses. So, we have said that it will take between 18 and 36 months to complete this exercise, but it’ll be in a sequence where we won’t do both at the same time. We will do it in a sequence way, and right now, we are on target to do that.
CT: So, pandemic or no pandemic, you will still spin off these two operating units eventually?
SV: Absolutely right. So, we are focused on that because we believe that it will unlock significant value, but more importantly, sustainable long-term value.
CT: And finally, as a co-founder and CEO of Olam International, what leadership will you provide to steer the agri-food giant out of this crisis?
SV: It’s not just me steering it out of this crisis, I have a great leadership team and great overall team in Olam. We have the strong support of our board and our shareholders. So, digitalization, sustainability will be the heart and engine while we differentiate these two businesses, OFI into a value-added ingredient solutions business and OGA into premier high return, high-growth food, feed and fiber business.
CT: Sunny, thank you so much for talking to me. Please stay safe and well during this time.
SV: Likewise, you also. Thank you very much.
END
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Jiva’s Makassar office will serve as the headquarters for South Sulawesi. The office will be a hub for our operations teams, who ensure that farmer loans and online inputs orders arrive at the right place and the right time. In addition, the Makassar office will serve as a key training centre, where the curriculum for our Jiva agents and farmers will be developed, tested, and launched!
The Jiva team is looking forward to making our home in Makassar and working hard for our farmers and Jiva agents.
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“To remain competitive, businesses will need to innovate and collaborate on a global scale. To support our businesses, I will invest in three key platforms.
a. The first platform is the Corporate Venture Launchpad, which will be piloted this year to drive new innovative ventures. This Launchpad will provide co-funding for corporates to build new ventures through pre-qualified venture studios. This is especially useful for larger businesses which want to rekindle a startup mindset within their organisations.
b. One such venture studio which I visited recently is BCG Digital Ventures. They collaborated with Olam, a Singapore food and agricultural multinational to build Jiva, a farmer services platform. This platform will help farmers in developing countries to increase crop yield, access credit, and connect directly to buyers. This venture helps meet the rising global food demand, while uplifting the income of farmers.
You can read the full address here.
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SINGAPORE — Around $24 billion will be spent over the next three years to help firms and workers adapt to the changing global landscape brought on in part by the pandemic.
The funds will go towards building a more vibrant business sector and innovation ecosystem, helping businesses to transform and scale up their operations, and creating opportunities for workers.
Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat said on Tuesday (Feb 16) that Singapore must deepen its position as a global-Asia node to emerge stronger from the Covid-19 crisis.
That will involve working to restore the country’s physical connectivity with the rest of the world, expand its digital connectivity and deepen its capacity to collaborate and innovate with global partners.
Singapore will invest in three platforms to help firms innovate and collaborate on a global scale, to help them remain competitive.
The Corporate Venture Launchpad will be piloted this year to drive innovative ventures, providing co-funding for companies to build new ventures through pre-qualified venture studios.
“This is especially useful for larger businesses which want to rekindle a start-up mindset within their organisations,” Mr Heng said.
He noted how BCG Digital Ventures, a venture studio, has collaborated with food and agricultural giant Olam to build a farmer services platform. The platform, Jiva, will help farmers in developing countries increase crop yield, access credit and connect directly with buyers.
The venture not only helps meet the rising global food demand, but also uplifts farmers’ incomes, he added.
In addition, the Open Innovation Platform will be enhanced to increase the speed and scale of digital innovation through new features such as a discovery engine. This will enable the platform to make automated recommendations as it helps to match problems faced by companies and public agencies with solution providers.
The platform also co-funds prototyping and deployment of solutions.
Enhancements will also be made to the Global Innovation Alliance, which helps to catalyse cross-border collaboration between Singapore and major global innovation hubs.
The network has 15 city links to the likes of Bangkok, Jakarta, London and San Francisco, and will be expanded to more than 25 cities over the next five years.
It will be given a boost by the Co-Innovation Programme, which will support up to 70 percent of qualifying costs for cross-border innovation and partnership projects.
The Singapore Intellectual Property Strategy 2030 is also being developed to support firms in commercializing the fruits of their innovation and help them in areas such as protecting and managing their intellectual property.
Further information on the strategy will be announced on World IP Day in April by the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore.
Strong connectivity will help businesses plug into global and regional supply chains and industry clusters, and deepen innovation partnerships, said Mr Heng, who is also Finance Minister.
Singapore has been stepping up its connectivity with Southeast Asian nations, he said, noting that the region has significant growth potential.
Among efforts to strengthen its links in the region include the inaugural Southeast Asia Open Innovation Challenge, which was launched last December. It drew participation from companies from countries including Indonesia and Thailand.
“We will continue to work closely with our Asean members, to enhance digital connectivity and cyber security, and to get ready for the fourth Industrial Revolution, building on initiatives such as the Asean Smart Cities Network,” Mr Heng added.
Singapore will also continue to enhance its infrastructure investments in the region, he said, such as through projects such as the Nongsa Digital Park to facilitate collaboration between Singapore firms and tech talent in Indonesia.
Singapore will invest in three platforms to help firms innovate and collaborate on a global scale, to help them remain competitive.
The Corporate Venture Launchpad will be piloted this year to drive innovative ventures, providing co-funding for companies to build new ventures through pre-qualified venture studios.
“This is especially useful for larger businesses which want to rekindle a start-up mindset within their organisations,” Mr Heng said.
He noted how BCG Digital Ventures, a venture studio, has collaborated with food and agricultural giant Olam to build a farmer services platform. The platform, Jiva, will help farmers in developing countries increase crop yield, access credit and connect directly with buyers.
The venture not only helps meet the rising global food demand but also uplifts farmers’ incomes, he added.
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The farmer services platform encompassed Jiva Agriculture and AgriCentral, a digital agri-advisory platform serving farmers in the Indian market.
Together under the Jiva umbrella but retaining their respective local brand names for continuity, Jiva Indonesia and AgriCentral will combine forces to reimagine food systems and reach millions of farmers around the world.
We are proud to welcome the AgriCentral team to Jiva and look forward to big growth, big ideas, and a big impact in the years to come.
For more information, see Olam International’s 2020 Annual Report
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At Jiva, we strive first and foremost to empower farmers and uplift their lives. Through our honest scales, accurate quality assessments, payment at the point of sale, and digital price comparison and breakdown tool, we ensure that selling to Jiva is a fair, stress-free, and efficient process. The tens of thousands of farmers who have trusted Jiva with their crops thus far only inspire us to improve for the next ten thousand…and the millions after that!
Jiva doesn’t just purchase crops. To best support the needs of our farmers, we offer four critical services to assist each farmer in all aspects of their trade, from pre-sow to post-harvest. The four services are:
Interested in Jiva? Follow us on Linkedin and Twitter or reach out at hello@jiva.ag
Smallholder AgriTech Southeast Asia Landscape 2021
Despite the outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic, AgriFood Tech startups raised more than US$26.1 billion in 2020, representing a 15.5% year-on-year increase. It was also the first time investment in upstream startups closer to the farm (eg. farm management systems, farm robotics, and agribusiness marketplaces) surpassed that of downstream in 7 years, according to AgFunder’s 2021 AgriFoodTech Investment Report.
The Smallholder AgriTech Southeast Asia Landscape focuses on high-impact technologies that impact smallholder farming. These startups have the potential to provide farmers with better access to information, markets, credit, and inputs, resulting in higher productivity and profitability. In 2020, Grow Asia identified five key agritech business models in Southeast Asia: Farmer Advisory, Peer-to-Peer Lending, Traceability, Digital Marketplaces, and Mechanization Platforms.
In the first session of Grow Asia’s Digital Learning Series for 2021, we will provide an update on the Smallholder AgriTech landscape in Southeast Asia and explore a widespread shift across the region as we see farmer advisory solutions explore adjacent business models in order to grow, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
For more information on GrowAsia, visit https://www.growasia.org/
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Jiva has successfully partnered with thousands of farmers across Indonesia to purchase over 5 MILLION kilograms of corn.
The tens of thousands of farmers who have trusted Jiva with their crops thus far only inspire us to improve for the next ten thousand…and the millions after that!
Jiva doesn’t just purchase crops. To best support the needs of our farmers, we offer four critical services to assist each farmer in all aspects of their trade, from pre-sow to post-harvest. The four services are:
Interested in Jiva? Follow us on Linkedin and Twitter or reach out at hello@jiva.ag
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In South Sulawesi, as in many communities across the world, the end of the season is often celebrated with a harvest festival. In Bahasa Indonesia, these occasions are called “Panen Raya” and often include local ceremonies, demonstrations from seed and fertilizer companies, and visits from local leaders and politicians.
This season, Jiva sponsored a Panen Raya in Gowa. Some of our farmers and Jiva agents captured the event on video. Check it out!
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AgriCentral is a Jiva entity that offers a variety of advisory services for a variety of crops through their application, including:
The AgriCentral team created a video in honor of the milestone. Check it out here.
We are incredibly proud of AgriCentral’s success to date and look forward to all that is to come!
For more information on AgriCentral, visit their website or follow them on LinkedIn
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To celebrate this milestone, here are some of our favourite images from the lives of our users — farmers and Jiva agents alike. They are our most important asset and we look forward to growing with them for years to come.
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To mark the occasion, AgriCentral created a video to recap the journey to this point. Check it out here
With a strong presence in the Indian market and plenty of new features in development, AgriCentral is poised to reach new heights in the coming months. Stay tuned!
For more information on AgriCentral, visit their website or follow them on LinkedIn
Throughout the year, we opened three new offices (Makassar, East Java and Bengaluru) and hired nearly 200 people across 3 primary regions (Singapore, Indonesia and India)!
We look forward to continued growth in 2022 powered by our exceptional, diverse and dedicated team.
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Read below for Jiva’s feature in Singapore daily newspaper Lianhe Zaobao.
Maintaining food security and building sustainable food production and ecosystems have become important priorities as the world population continues to expand, paired with the climate change issues.
Since 2013, Temasek has invested more than US$8 billion (approximately S$11 billion) in 30 agri-food technology companies, hoping to use innovative technologies to help build a more resilient food system through the development of innovative agricultural technologies such as drip irrigation, synthetic biology, and less resource-intensive vertical farming.
Compared with 10 years ago, the ratio of investment in life sciences and agri-food to Temasek’s investment portfolio has risen significantly, from 1% to 10%. The return on investment has long-term growth potential and at the same time has a positive impact on global society.
Yeoh Keat Chuan, Temasek’s Vice President of Global Corporate Development and Vice President of Singapore Project Coordination, pointed out that climate change, the deterioration of the natural environment, and the increasing urban population have all posed major challenges to food and agriculture in Asia.
He continued, “Although the companies we invest in may be different, they share the same goal, which is to build a more resilient food system and reduce the carbon footprint of the agri-food industry. This also aligns with our long-term view of this field.”
Temasek, for example, has invested in Next Gen Foods, a plant protein product company based in Singapore. TiNDLE, the company’s initial product, makes chicken alternatives from nine natural materials like soybeans, wheat, and sunflower oil, lowering the amount of land required by 74%, greenhouse gas emissions by 88%, and water use by 82%.
Alternative proteins are also being developed by another Temasek-backed growth company, Growthwell. Protein extraction from chickpeas is the company’s patented method. In an interview, Justin Chou, executive director of the growth company, stated that chickpeas have all of the amino acids required by the human body.
Growing company: Creating alternative protein products and supporting environmentally friendly eating habits
Justin Chou, a lifelong vegetarian, also expressed his desire to develop alternative protein products that will encourage more people to become flexible vegetarians (flexitarians) and support more environmentally friendly eating habits.
As Asian societies become more prosperous, consumers are paying more and more attention to health and sustainable development, resulting in a significant increase in demand for food and food products in this area. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Rabobank, and Temasek recently released the 2021 Asia Food Challenge report, estimating that around US$1.55 trillion in investment will be required to meet Asian consumers demand over the next ten years.
In addition to innovative ingredients, Temasek is also aware of the importance of improving upstream productivity and efficiency in the food and food value chain. Temasek’s investment portfolio company, Olam International, has fostered a new venture, Jiva, which provides smallholder farmers with accurate and real-time farming information and microloans through a digital platform, and at the same time purchases smallholder farmers’ crops at market prices to help to protect the income of small farmers from being devoured and exploited by middlemen.
Jiva President, Ramanarayanan Mahadevan, pointed out in an interview that 525 million small farmers around the world grow 70% of the world’s food.
Integrated with technology such as machine learning systems and satellite data Jiva’s digital platform is able to predict the growth of crops in real-time. These predictions are only for specific farmers, and farmers nearby will get different predictions according to different seeds, sowing time, and planting locations.
If there are diseases and insect pests that farmers are not familiar with, they can use their mobile phones to photograph them and send the photos to Jiva. Jiva has also set up an e-commerce platform for small farmers to purchase the farming supplies they need at reasonable prices. This means that they can choose to buy agricultural supplies from Jiva and pay later.
In order to protect the interests of small farmers from being swallowed by middlemen, Jiva purchases crops from small farmers at market prices. Mahathir said that Jiva publishes the purchase price on the platform every day based on the market price, and small farmers can decide for themselves whether to trade at that price.
Jiva currently has a complete business model in Indonesia, with a total of 54,000 small farmers registered on the platform. Jiva also invested S$14 million to acquire 35,000 metric tons of crops and provided S$1.5 million in loans to more than 4,100 small farmers.
Although Jiva has 5.7 million users in India, at this stage it only launches personalized consulting services for small farmers.
Rome was not built in a day, Mahadevan said,
“Jiva’s model has been proven feasible in Indonesia, and the next step is to move in the direction of expansion.”
This includes providing services in more places and for more small farmers who grow different crops.
He wrapped up his statement with, “We will not just be satisfied with bringing changes to tens of thousands of small farmers, we have to bring substantial changes to millions of small farmers.”
Read the original article here: https://www.zaobao.com.sg/finance/singapore/story20211219-1223436
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Last week, Jiva was featured in the Times of India.
He argues that to reinvent agricultural systems, we must borrow elements from popular consumer technologies. This strategy reduces the adoption hurdles for communities with low literacy and low technical fluency, as well as those who lack trust in technology. Ultimately he poses the question, why can’t Agtech become consumer tech?
Read on for a quote from the article:
“With simple, user-friendly technologies, we have the power to organise enormous tracts of data, package it and deliver it to users in a way that is dynamic, simple and highly personalised to their needs. As such, common consumer technologies are critical to the design and delivery of farmer-focused Agtech solutions. This is particularly true for those that underpin the apps we use everyday, such as advisory services, chat bots, AI-powered image recognition, digital loans and e-commerce stores. Platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp and Youtube are enormously popular among smallholder farmer populations. Why can’t AgTech borrow from these tools that farmers already know how to use? Why can’t AgTech become consumer tech?
Read the full piece here: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/voices/future-proofing-agricultural-systems-requires-user-centric-design-and-thoughtful-delivery/
But what makes a problem “wicked”?
By definition, a wicked problem is one that is difficult or impossible to solve due to its complex, ill-defined or contradictory elements. Often, “wicked” refers to a problem that does not have any singular solution.
These problems are caused and perpetuated by a dizzying web of interdependent forces. More often than not, these problems stack like nesting dolls, reinforcing one another and becoming more convoluted with time. In the case of rural agriculture, where economic and educational disparity collide with lack of access to technology, creating a working definition of the problem space can be a daunting task.
Seamus Tardif, Jiva’s Head of Growth, led several trips to Indonesia to give the team the opportunity to sit with community members — from farmers to traders to local officials — and speak about their experiences, successes and limitations within the current system. These trips ultimately defined our product strategy and the way we measure impact. Seamus explains, “What we’re battling is hundreds of years of a system that is stacked against these individuals. To make progress we must fundamentally change the way supply chains are structured, how value is distributed and how people acquire, accrue and apply knowledge. Ultimately, we are trying to change the odds in our farmer’s favor”.
To make progress we must fundamentally change the way supply chains are structured, how value is distributed and how people acquire, accrue and apply knowledge. Ultimately, we are trying to change the odds in our user’s favor
How does one begin to unwind generations of entrenched inequality and “change the odds”? Aria Nurfikry, Jiva’s Growth & Marketing Manager for Indonesia, believes that it all begins with trust. When discussing what surprised him about working with farmers, he noted, “the importance of the value of community in enhancing the credibility of our message. Trust is paramount in this market, and everything we do needs to drive towards building and reinforcing trust in Jiva within these communities”.
Building trust in a digital product, however, is not as easy as creating a simple and beautiful user experience or proclaiming a value proposition through a Facebook advertisement. For many who work and live in rural communities, inherent trust of, and comfort with, digital products do not yet exist.
Seamus explains, “we’re working with a population that has come online in the last 5 years. There is no such thing as a digital native. For hundreds if not thousands of years, these communities have operated without us. Our job now is to reframe technology as a tool for good; as something useful that can be relied on.” He continues, “Think about the developed world’s own adoption curve of technology. In the early 90s, very few of us understood its use cases. It usually took a friend or family member to demystify it”.
Jiva relies on a similar, community-first approach to build trust in our products. However, while many digital-first companies hope that organic referrals will lead to virality, we take a deliberate approach to employ key members of farming communities, whose deep relationships within local villages accelerate familiarity with, and adoption of, Jiva.
The familiarity that our on-ground team has with the lives of the farmers allow them to act as ambassadors of the service; they explain Jiva’s purpose, relate the use case to the individual farmer’s needs, and show farmers how to navigate the application. Instead of seeing a single, impersonal advertisement, farmers are likely to hear about Jiva from multiple known sources, building trust in the brand prior to adoption. Aria concludes,
“An omnichannel approach is critical because farmers need to know who we are; it’s easier to trust a friend who lives in your community than an application you’re seeing for the first time”.
Jiva’s growth team is therefore focused on designing, as Seamus describes it, “a softer approach to digital adoption”, through the deployment of on-ground community members who can ignite a self-perpetuating flywheel of trusted recommendations among disparate and hard-to-reach areas. Without this omnichannel approach, he notes, “it would take ten years to accomplish what we want to in two”.
At a fundamental level, this model seeks to minimize the amount of behavioral change required in adopting Jiva. By design, we ask an immense amount from our users: change your farming practices after decades in the field, buy your seeds online rather than at the local market, receive a digital loan, and do it all through a company you’ve just heard about. Employing friends and family of farmers as conduits of Jiva’s value and first-adopters of our products allows us to take a major element of this behavioral change — lack of face to face interaction — out of the equation. As Aria puts it, “our customer acquisition model allows us to be disruptive, but not prohibitively so”.
Ultimately, while Jiva is a startup that builds technology, our service will never be digital-only. Our relationships and actions within the community have an inherent physical component, and the experience of our farmers is heavily shaped by our employees on the ground. In fact, the majority of the user experience occurs between the farmer and these community employees, rather than between the farmer and the app screen.
Jiva’s engineers, designers, and product managers can build seamless and stunning digital experiences, but it’s the ability of Jiva’s on-ground network to truly embed the brand and its purpose within the community-conscious that drives customer acquisition, activation, and retention.
Wicked problems are complex and multifaceted. True progress against these problems requires a deep understanding of the lived experiences of the people that are subject to them — the big and the small, the universal truths and the personal nuances. Without that deep understanding, products, services and processes built for good may fail to reach critical adoption or address the true pain points felt by the user. In order to create lasting impact, we must meet our users in their communities, understand their pain points and treat them as partners in the evolution of our solutions. And all that begins with trust.
Seamus, when reflecting on Jiva’s community-driven growth model, concludes,
“A trust-first approach is not typical, but we aren’t trying to do something typical. When we crack the code and get millions of smallholder farmers to join us, we won’t be measuring impact in the number of users we have, but rather the step-change in power that their voice will have in the world”.
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Christine Devlin: Aakash, thanks for taking the time to chat. Let’s begin with a bit of your background. You’ve been in startups now for over a decade — where’d it all begin?
Aakash Dharmadhikari: I began my startup career at a company called Burrp!, which was an early player in the food discovery scene in India — a bit like Yelp. The startup scene in India was in its infancy at the time, so moving from a corporate to a startup was less common than it is today.
C: Would it be fair to say that move was a little more risky? If so, what factors outweighed the risk for you?
A: I suppose it was riskier than staying at an established corporate, but risk didn’t play into my decision then. To be honest, risk hasn’t guided any of my career decisions. For that job in particular, it was the people. I remember coming away eager to work with the people who had interviewed me. You could tell they were no-nonsense, execution-oriented, and excited about what they were working on.
C: Looking back, what was the biggest change that you experienced after moving from a corporate to a startup?
A: The aspect of startup work that surprised me the most was the degree to which you have to work and think cross-functionally. When I started, I had focused solely on software development and the skills that job entails. Burrp! was my first time working with product managers, designers, content strategists, and others. I grew so much during that time due in large part to the exposure to other skill sets, functions, perspectives and priorities.
C: You then went on to co-found C42 Consulting with Niranjan, Jiva’s current CTO. Tell me about that.
A: C42 was a group of very eccentric, very smart people, some of whom have joined us at Jiva. We took on developer-centric consulting projects and built tools that are used globally today. But we had zero business sense and often went too deep on the build side. For example, we spent 6 months geeking out on Rubymonk, an e-learning platform for developers that saw 50,000 users on its first day. At the end of 6 months, we had perfected the code base but had no monetisation strategy. We decided that building products and consulting in parallel was difficult, so we handed the consulting business over to our employees and tried our hand at building our own app.
C: Was that app an extension of Rubymonk or a different product entirely?
It was a matrimony app for the Indian market, actually. Though there is demand for dating apps like Tinder, we felt there was an opportunity to serve the much larger traditional matrimony space. You can think about the delivery model as monster.com vs. LinkedIn, where a matrimony service is like the former and involves recruitment, a resume and interviews. We hypothesized that Matrimony, like LinkedIn, values the shared connections more than resumes.
We had no operational background at the time and ended up playing around with business models; was it a white label site, a data collection play, a freemium product? We pivoted about half a dozen times in a year before tabling it.
C: From an e-learning platform for developers to a matrimony app! How did you end up at GoJek?
A: After the experiment with the matrimony app, I returned to consulting for startups. Many of my friends were engineers at companies like Flipkart. At the time, there was a big shift from single, monolithic architectures to more agile, modern stacks in an effort to drive scale, deeper personalisation and better efficiency. My team and I took on those projects and eventually partnered with Sequoia, which gave us access to their portfolio of companies. It was through Sequoia that we began working with, and were ultimately aqui-hired by, GoJek.
C: At what point in this journey did you transition from engineering to product?
A: I had been working cross-functionally for a while, but didn’t officially label it until GoJek. I joined as an engineer at a time when we faced a high rate of churn in requirements. This made the engineering team appear inefficient, though the problem was the direction we were given. If you give incorrect blueprints to a construction team, and you have to ask them to demolish and rebuild the structure halfway through, are they inefficient? No, the issue is the architect.
I kept telling the CEO that he needed to rethink product management. After about 3 months he said, “Fine, if you know so much about it, you run it”. I said “Ok, sure” and that was that.
C: The product market fit for GoJek’s first product — ride hailing — was off the charts. Jiva is an entirely different ballgame. For us, product market fit can shift with each new crop and geography. How do you prioritise build?
A: From my perspective, Jiva’s product market fit is comprised of two components: Business Market Fit and Digital Product Market Fit. From a Business Market Fit perspective, there is no question: farmers, and the rural ecosystem more broadly, want this product. That is pure economics. The second piece, the Digital Product Market Fit, is what no one has solved and is part of the reason product at Jiva is so interesting.
So, we are focusing now on delivery of the digital product. We are asking ourselves, which features, design principles, elements of the user experience and engagement strategies will deliver exceptional, one-of-a-kind digital experiences to this user base? Prioritisation comes from, and evolves in response to, the answers to these questions.
At the end of the day, engagement is what matters. We want the parts of the business designed to engage users to scale rapidly and create leads for the parts of the business that drive revenue. We want those experiences to have impact and encourage retention, which then drives further engagement. That user model is no different than GoJek, among other platforms.
C: I think it’s natural to draw parallels between the two platforms as both operate logistics networks and rely on a hybrid human-technology model, but the end user and engagement strategies differ meaningfully. Talk me through the specifics of how Jiva and GoJek rely on a similar user model.
A: No question, Jiva’s end user and engagement strategies are unique. But below all that, both platforms rely on four key pillars. They are:
These four product pillars form the bedrock of Jiva and many other products. With a strong foundation, we have the opportunity to launch other services, add features, learn from the user, bring on partners and create a true ecosystem for all stakeholders.
C: That’s fascinating. It sounds like you have serious ambitions to build a rural superapp…
A: We’ll see!
C: One final question — From your perspective, what is unique and exciting about the product challenge at Jiva?
A: Product managers love two things: figuring out the current rules of the game and how to manipulate those rules to optimise their outcomes. At Jiva, the rules of the game are still being mapped, let alone optimised. And although there is a fair amount of “low hanging fruit” in rural agriculture, the complexity of the domain and its users mean operationalising those are not as easy. This complexity, coupled with the sheer impact it represents, is what makes product at Jiva so exciting.
Interested in applying for a role at Jiva? Check out our careers HQ, website or email us directly at careers@jiva.ag
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“From a business perspective, the data asset that would result from a 10–15% market share would be unprecedented. No one has that data — not governments, not NGOs, no one. With that data, the possibilities for Jiva are endless. That in and of itself is a very exciting prospect.”
Christine Devlin: Niranjan, thanks for taking the time to chat. Let’s begin with your time at C42, the developer-consulting firm you co-founded. How did that experience shape you?
Niranjan Paranjape: C42 taught me a lot about running a business. The importance of survival has really stuck with me; if you want to see a business succeed — even if you have to bootstrap and hack your way to a product — you cannot ignore the short term tactical wins which keep business afloat. If the business fails to survive, your great long-term strategy won’t matter. This lesson applies to everything from team culture to product architecture.
C: When I spoke to Jiva CPO Aakash Dharmadhikari about his time at C42, he mentioned how easy it was fall down the engineering rabbit hole for months at a time, often without a business strategy. Did your experiences at C42 teach you a similar lesson?
N: Yes definitely. I learned a lot about leading a process and building with business in mind. There was a lot that I had to unlearn when I moved to GoJek, though. For example, at C42 we focused on doing one thing really, really well before broadening scope. At GoJek, demand was so high for our products that the strategy was reversed: the market was hot, so we built as many products as possible to see what would stick. From there, we’d scale. This is not a conventional strategy and really pushed me to be an organised team leader.
C: A Product Market Fit that is too strong? That’s a problem so many of us dream of.
N: It was exciting to see such a high demand for our product, but the problem was scaling our systems to meet that demand. When we introduced surge pricing, for example, we expected it to relieve some of the pressure on the application by reducing traffic. Instead, people just changed their travel patterns. That’s how much they liked the service. We had to build the organisation really quickly to meet the moment, scale and continue to deliver a reliable product.
C: In the case of those early GoJek days, how did you balance building for scale versus building for quality?
N: There are three parameters in every development project: scope, quality and time. If you pull one lever, the others must move. Leading effectively meant that I had to be very clear about that. If, for example, we were running up against a deadline, we would have to adjust scope in order to maintain the level of quality that our users were accustomed to. You have to be comfortable making a judgement call on what you’re willing to compromise.
C: Were there any particular moments when those three pillars were put to the test?
N: Plenty of times. One that is coming to mind was the challenge of re-writing the code that manages the driver’s location. A week or two after we re-launched the service, our driver base jumped from 20,000 to 150,000. If we hadn’t built that service in time, and if we hadn’t done it well, everything would have come to a screeching halt.
Another challenge was the insane speed of the GoCar launch. We wanted to launch it before Uber launched their motorcycle service. We had one month from inception to go-live. One month! It was literally myself and a few other folks on a whiteboard, drawing all the services and prioritising for the MVP one day and beginning build the next. That experience really taught me rapid, disciplined prioritisation.
C: How did you control the chaos during those early days?
N: I had the opportunity to hire my mentors, which helped a lot in controlling quality and consistency of builds. Many of us had worked closely together before and came to the room with very similar build strategies and philosophies. Beyond that, we had to pull ourselves out of the day to day execution when possible and focus on recruitment and expansion. The GoJek team in India grew 700% in 2,5 years.
What sold me on Jiva was the sheer potential for impact — the problem is so critical and the market is so large. In the next 10 years, we need to increase the average yield per hectare that these farmers produce in order to continue to feed the world. There are 525 million smallholder farmers alone. Plus, our product will impact not only the lives of the farmers but on all of us that rely on them, whether we realise it or not.
From a business perspective, the data asset that would result from a 10–15% market share would be unprecedented. No one has that data — not governments, not NGOs, no one. With that data, the possibilities for Jiva are endless. That in and of itself is a very exciting prospect.
C: There are a lot of misconceptions about the space, the problems farmers face and how to solve them. How has your understanding of the technical challenge changed since joining Jiva?
N: I think AgTech scares people because they think you need to have deep agronomic or supply chain knowledge. That’s not true. At the end of the day, this isn’t a deep tech problem or a precision farming problem. At least not yet. For the time being, the challenge is understanding, organising and codifying a complex domain. Once you understand enough to balance the sheer size of the sector with its nuances, you can build and deploy highly impactful and valuable products.
The positive side of the enormity of this domain is that demand is not an issue — we know farmers want and need these services. We need to find simplicity and scalability within the complexity in order to capitalise on that product market fit.
The other technological challenge worth mentioning is the lack of rapid feedback loops. At GoJek, we had near-live feedback for millions of transactions every day. At Jiva, we have to be more creative in sourcing feedback and analysing data, as our users are not digital natives and our digital touchpoints with the end user may be seasonal or more sporadic.
C: What’s next for tech and engineering at Jiva?
N: There are so many directions we’re looking to explore. At a fundamental level, we want to think about the future of Jiva holistically: how can we build the farmer community beyond advisory and supply chain? Top of the list includes mapping of farms to revolutionise the KYC process and increase financial inclusivity, deepen our relationship with farmers through access to weather, prices, e-commerce and leverage IoT sensors to provide information like soil health and predictive yield. For this space, there is no ceiling.
C: Finally, for those who may be interested in joining us, what is it like to work as an engineer in at Jiva?
N: I think candidates need to know that we are very much still a startup. Just like my early days at GoJek — I don’t have an answer to “What is the job?”. At Jiva, you can have whatever responsibility you want, but everyone needs to be present when things are bugging. Our Head of Farmer Services, for example, has spent his entire time at Jiva building our Supply Chain processes instead. We are ultimately working within very real biological cycles with changing conditions on the ground. We are constantly evolving in response. It is thrilling, but it’s not for everyone.
Interested in joining Jiva? Check out our careers HQ. For more information, visit us at jiva.ag or on Linkedin.
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Jiva is building a suite of applications, products, and services to digitize the rural supply chain and bring rural farming into the future.
Jiva partners with both farmers and supply chain stakeholders from the planning stage to post-harvest, offering four key services:
Together these services address critical farmer needs and create efficiencies in the rural supply chain, unlocking substantial value for farmers, their families, and their communities.
525 million smallholder farmers grow 70% of the world’s food, yet are among the poorest and most underserved communities on earth. Moreover, rural farmers are some of the most vulnerable to the shifting conditions that result from climate change.
At Jiva, we know that increasing farmer yields, incomes, and access to information with modern technology will preserve smallholder livelihoods and strengthen their resiliency in a rapidly changing world.
We are passionate about our purpose to uplift the lives of our farmers. Each day we have the opportunity to build relationships with farmers and their families, design for their specific needs, and introduce technological solutions where none existed before.
Since the launch of our digital supply chain and advisory services in Indonesia in late 2020, we have grown to a community of tens of thousands of farmers and local stakeholders, extending hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit and purchasing millions of kilograms of harvest.
We are looking for exceptional engineering, product, and design talent to fuel our next phase of growth.
Interested in learning more? Check us out at www.jiva.ag or email us directly at hello@jiva.ag
Jiva was chosen to represent Indonesia and SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) - as a digital solution that helps the global community accelerate our progress in achieving zero hunger by 2030.
Ram presented how Jiva is helping smallholder farmers, who produce 70% of the world's food but are amongst the most hungry people in the world, by solving the multifaceted challenges they face every day: lack of access to technology, low level of digital literacy, unfair markets, and minimal opportunity to get financial services.
When we help solve these challenges, smallholder farmers will get better income and livelihoods - and when we make sure that the world's largest food producers are prosperous, we are on the fast track towards solving world hunger.
We are honoured to be a part of this noble mission of ensuring the achievement of sustainable development goals while making the world a little bit more equal for everyone.
Ruwatan is a Javanese tradition in which ceremonies are performed to repel bad luck and avoid misfortune. Villagers gather for a carnival, dancing to traditional music and parading around the village in costumes and giant papier-mâché crop varieties. For farmers, it is a cleansing ritual to wish for a bountiful harvest.
This year, Jiva supported one of our Sahabat Jiva (our partner micro-collector) in Jombang, Minadi, and his network of smallholder farmers to participate in a festive Ruwatan ceremony.
Let’s wish for their abundant harvest!
Being close to our farmers is very important for Jiva. Respecting and being involved in their tradition is our way to be an integral part of their community. It helps us get to know them better so we can find better ways to help them get better livelihoods.
Find out more about our mission to help uplift the livelihoods of smallholder farmers around the world by following us on LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube.
In his talk at the forum, in which over 100 CFOs and business leaders convened to share their experiences, learnings, and strategies that let them stay ahead of the game in their expertise, Ashish highlighted how he leveraged new technologies to optimise financial processes at Jiva
In his talk at the forum, in which over 100 CFOs and business leaders convened to share their experiences, learnings, and strategies that let them stay ahead of the game in their expertise, Ashish highlighted how he leveraged new technologies to optimise financial processes at Jiva.
“The use of No Code and AI in finance can definitely improve the efficiency and accuracy in financial processes, which can lead to better decision-making and, ultimately, business growth,” Ashish said, as he showed the instances of how Jiva utilises No Code or Text-to-Code, automation, and live finance modelling to the audience in Pullman Jakarta.
At Jiva, we ensure to demystify the complexity of AI, leap beyond its scary unknown, and leverage it as a helpful tool at our disposal.
Read more about how we leverage the latest technology to help smallholder farmers grow better crops and earn more income by following us on LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube.
Our partnership team, Jeffri Yokaswendra and Rachmad Hariotomo, presented to the Ministry what Jiva has been doing with the farming community in villages across seven provinces in Indonesia, and more specifically, the project that we recently piloted with Village-Owned Enterprises (BUMDes) in Central Java called “Jiva Village.”
As the Ministry has declared its support for the Jiva Village program, we are now preparing to sign an MoU to establish this partnership.
Jiva is happy to have all the support we can get to help us uplift the livelihoods of smallholder farmers across Indonesia and eventually around the world.
Joining forces with the government will advance our endeavours to reshape agriculture and empower farmers to adopt better agricultural practices and grow their income.
Earlier this month, our Chief Finance Officer for Jiva Indonesia, Ashish Agarwal, also signed a KUR loan agreement with Bank Mandiri in Makassar.
This agreement with two state-owned banks will help smallholder farmers access loans and grow their farms because they often face difficulties in obtaining loans due to, for instance, a lack of proximity to financial services.
The mission to empower smallholder farmers and help them improve their livelihoods is too heavy of rock to lift alone. That is why Jiva is happy to partner with people who share our dream to make the world a little more equal for our farmers.
Learn more about Jiva and our mission to help empower 500 million smallholder farmers by following us on LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube.
Jiva’s Head of Growth Seamus Tardif explains in the article the great challenge of technology adoption within the smallholder farming community, our “phygital” (blend of physical and digital) approach, and how Jiva is using the latest technology to help make farming a more prospective, sustainable occupation to ensure food security.
Read the full article here: https://www.theedgesingapore.com/digitaledge/digital-economy/solving-global-food-crisis-technology
Since rice is a staple food for most people in Asia, the upcoming major rice shortage will put the region’s food security at risk. The global rice market is set to log its largest shortfall in two decades in 2023, according to Fitch Solutions’ Country Risk and Industry Research dated April 4. This is due to the knock-on effect of the ongoing war in Ukraine and bad weather in rice-producing countries like China and Pakistan. Consequently, the price of rice will average US$17.30 ($22.90) per cwt through this year and is likely to ease to US$14.50 per cwt only in 2024. (Cwt is a unit of measurement for commodities such as rice.)
Yields of other crops are also expected to be affected due to food distribution, energy and fertiliser shortages. This is why the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2023 identifies the food supply crunch as one of the biggest risks to the world economy in the next two years.
Using technology to modernise agricultural processes and enable data-driven decisions is essential to securing our food supply. In fact, the International Food Policy Research Institute predicts that data-driven agriculture techniques can increase farm productivity by as much as 67% by 2050 while simultaneously cutting down on agricultural and food losses.
Yet, less than one-tenth of farmers in Asia are using or planning to use at least one agriculture technology (agritech or agtech) solution in the next two years.
Seamus Tardif, head of growth at Jiva — a Singapore-headquartered agritech company operating across Indonesia and India — agrees that smallholder farmers tend to be hesitant to adopt technology as they may not fully understand the value of digitalising farming practices. “The challenge may not always be a lack of smartphones or connectivity, which are of course huge challenges, but it may also be a lack of education that technology can be used to help with their farming needs. For instance, we see many farmers using YouTube and Google for entertainment but not education. They will still ask their neighbours what they think the weather will be like tomorrow. Because of this, we’ve taken a more phygital [physical and digital] approach to getting our services to villages,” he says.
Smallholder farmers, he adds, need social proof before deciding to use technology to transform how they work. “Every change could result in a possible loss of income or breaking of a long-term partnership with local businesses. [So, these farmers will be motivated to transform only when they] see many others around them also changing.
“Also, smallholder farmers are keen to witness the benefits they can expect before they embrace technology. [This is why Jiva] runs demo programmes and invests in village systems by running educational roadshows. In Indonesia, we’ve directly educated over 20,000 farmers through on-the-ground roadshows and established “Jiva Villages” that showcase our 360-degree services. As we proceed, we collect testimonials, such as farmers who doubled their yield and income by following Jiva’s advisory and utilising Jiva’s input and harvest services. We can then share these powerful stories with other farmers to help alleviate their concerns,” he explains.
According to The World Bank, most smallholder farmers live below the poverty line, subsisting on less than US$2 a day. “There are four main reasons for this: Restricted access to high-quality farming inputs, lack of capital at critical moments in the farming cycle, information asymmetry at the time of sale, and improper farming practices,” notes Tardif.
To address this, Jiva provides easy access to high-quality farming inputs, offers credit facilities for farming inputs, enables harvest to be bought at fair and transparent prices, and provides agronomy advisory services for free. “By improving their livelihoods, we believe we can inspire the next generation of farmers and make farming a more profitable and sustainable occupation for generations to come, [which could help strengthen] food security,” he says.
Tardif explains that Jiva operates in a phygital ecosystem. “On the physical side, we work with rural entrepreneurs (which are farmers, collectors, and village-level retailers) and supply chain partners. On the digital side, we have three customer-facing mobile apps — one for each customer group: Farmers, retailers, and collectors. Moreover, we have an extensive automated back-end system for managing transactions, risks, and analytics, which are also made available to our field teams through internally-facing mobile applications.”
Jiva’s farmer app offers agronomy advisory services that leverage machine visioning (which is the ability of a computer to “see” images) and artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver real-time crop diagnoses and treatment recommendations by simply taking a photo. It also provides market pricing on key commodities to help farmers make informed decisions on when to sell and the price they can expect to receive based on their crop. “We will soon release a new large language model-based advisory service that draws from our extensive agronomy knowledge base to allow farmers to ask a variety of questions beyond pest and disease management. To purchase farming inputs and get access to credit, farmers can connect with one of Jiva’s collectors or retailers,” he says.
Meanwhile, collectors can use Jiva’s collector app to purchase harvest, sell inputs, and perform credit know-your-customer checks easily. The retailer app gives retailers access to Jiva’s extensive range of high-quality farming inputs such as fertilisers and agricultural equipment.
For its back-end systems, Jiva uses a variety of tech platforms and automation to assist with the management of inventory, transactions, risk, and services to farmers, collectors, and retailers. “Our credit risk assessment tool utilises AI to identify the risk level of each credit request and determine if Jiva should or should not accept a particular cash-advance request. This assessment looks at various events leading up to the request to determine the legitimacy of the request and the likelihood of default, regardless of whether a collector/farmer has been given credit in the past. The aim is to reduce default rates to ensure we can maintain a sustainable credit/cash-advance system.
“We are also evolving our pricing systems to incorporate predictive pricing through machine learning. This will look at the multiple years of the pricing data we have access to across commodities, as well as the current pricing trends and other factors, to help provide a pricing estimate for our operations management team to use to set our daily prices,” states Tardif.
In a recent survey of more than 200 respondents in Indonesia and India, farmers and collectors who leveraged Jiva’s services saw their income increase by 25%. Farmers who used Jiva’s agronomy advisory also increased their yields by up to 49%.
“Additionally, we have heard across multiple sources that Jiva’s commodity prices are now the benchmark of prices across our operating areas. This means that even those farmers who aren’t working directly with Jiva benefit from Jiva being in the ecosystem. We have worked hard to improve efficiencies in the agricultural supply chain and reduce the possibility of bad actors inflating margins, which has resulted in more value being driven back to the farmer,” shares Tardif.
Our Chief Technology Officer, Tejas Dinkar, explains how our field teams, with our network of farmers and agronomy experts, collected and annotated hundreds of thousands of images from the ground to train the AI model to identify crop pests and diseases and how to treat them.
Read the full article here.
By Eileen Yu, ZDNET Senior Contributing Editor
Organizations that want to harness generative artificial intelligence (AI) more effectively should use their own data to train AI systems, using foundation models as a starting point.
Doing so can provide more relevant context and allay concerns about the potential risks, such as inaccuracy and intellectual property infringements.
Accuracy, in particular, is a top priority for a company such as Jiva. The agritech vendor uses AI to power its mobile app, Crop Doctor, which identifies crop diseases via image processing and computer vision, and recommends treatments. It also taps AI to determine the credit worthiness of farmers who ask for cash advancements prior to a harvest and returns the loans when their harvest pays out.
It uses various AI and machine-learning tools, including Pinecorn, OpenAI, and scikit-learn, as well as Google's TensorFlow and Vertex AI. Jiva has operations in Singapore, Indonesia, and India.
It trains its AI models on thousands of annotated images for each disease, according to Jiva's CTO Tejas Dinkar. The agritech company has collected hundreds of thousands of images from the ground through its field teams and farmers who are part of Jiva's network and use its app AgriCentral, which is available in India.
Its field experts are involved in the initial collection and annotation of images, before these are passed on to agronomy experts who further annotate the images. These then are added to the training model used to identify plant disease.
For new crops or crops that its team of experts are less familiar with, Jiva brings in other platforms, such as Plantix, which have extensive datasets to power image recognition and diagnosis information.
It uses various AI and machine-learning tools, including Pinecorn, OpenAI, and scikit-learn, as well as Google's TensorFlow and Vertex AI. Jiva has operations in Singapore, Indonesia, and India.
It trains its AI models on thousands of annotated images for each disease, according to Jiva's CTO Tejas Dinkar. The agritech company has collected hundreds of thousands of images from the ground through its field teams and farmers who are part of Jiva's network and use its app AgriCentral, which is available in India.
Its field experts are involved in the initial collection and annotation of images, before these are passed on to agronomy experts who further annotate the images. These then are added to the training model used to identify plant disease.
For new crops or crops that its team of experts are less familiar with, Jiva brings in other platforms, such as Plantix, which have extensive datasets to power image recognition and diagnosis information.
Where there is a lack of robust AI models, humans can step back in.
For rare or highly specific crop issues, Dinkar noted that Jiva's team of agronomy experts can work with local researchers and field teams to resolve them.
The company's credit assessment team also overlays data generated by the AI systems with other information, he said. For example, the team may make an on-site visit and realize a crop is just recently ready for harvest, which the AI-powered system may not have taken into consideration when it generated the credit assessment.
"The objective is not to remove humans entirely, but to move them to areas they can amplify and [apply] adaptive thoughts, which machines aren't yet up to," Dinkar said.
Asked about challenges Jiva encountered with its generative AI adoption, he pointed to the lack of a standard prompt methodology across difference software versions and providers.
"True omni-lingualism" also is missing in LLMs, he said, while hallucination remains a key issue.
"Various large language models all have their own quirks [and] the same prompt techniques do not work across these," he explained. For instance, through refined prompt engineering, Jiva has been able to instruct its agronomy bot to clarify if it is unable to infer, from context, the crop that the farmer is referencing.
However, while this particular prompt performed well on GPT-3.5, it did not do as well on GPT-4, he said. It also does not work on a different LLM.
"The inability to reuse prompts across versions and platforms necessitates the creation of bespoke sets of prompt techniques for each one," Dinkar said. "As tooling improves and best practices emerge for prompting various large language models, we hope cross-platform prompts will become a reality."
Improvements are also needed in cross-language support, he said, pointing to strange responses that its chatbot sometimes generates that are out of context.
Singapore has carved out dedicated cloud resources so its government agencies can deploy artificial intelligence (AI) applications more efficiently and securely.
The cloud cluster has been established with the aim of driving up AI adoption in the public sector and supporting research into how AI can be applied, said the Smart Nation and Digital Government Office (SNDGO). It will also support local AI startups, according to the government agency.
Called the AI Government Cloud Cluster, the platform runs within a dedicated environment on Google Cloud, where the U.S. vendor's AI technology stack and partner applications are available for deployment. These resources include A2 supercomputers running on Nvidia's A100 GPUs and a repository of AI models, running first- and second-party as well as open source platforms, which government agencies can customize for their specific requirements. The AI models span multi-language text translation, audio-to-text conversion, and software coding.
Several global "shifts" have underscored the need for a new approach to technology, with AI and cloud playing key roles, according to Chan Cheow Hoe, SNDGO's government CTO and senior advisor for the Singapore Economic Development Board.
Speaking at the Google summit, Chan pointed to environment and technology changes and said people now want to know the impact digitalization has on the environment and on their personal security. More people are exposed to cybersecurity risks and investors want to see results, with businesses having to work harder for every dollar.
There are more significant trust and safety concerns compared to a couple of years ago, where fewer people cared about these issues, he said. There is also zero tolerance for downtime, where online services and apps that go down for an hour will make headlines.
With technology now omnipresent and touching every facet of daily life, Chan stressed the need to safeguard customers and citizens and ensure systems and services are trusted -- otherwise no one will want to use the technology.
There have also been big technological shifts and he pointed to cloud, alongside SaaS (software-as-a-service), and generative AI as the key ones that hold significance.
Heralding the Singapore government's cloud journey, which began seven years ago, Chan said the move was important not just for cost efficiencies, but also to provide access to a global ecosystem of the best technology resources. Organizations that do not open up to the cloud also risk running bespoke applications that might not be able to scale quickly and support faster times to market, he added.
However, many organizations remain straddled with legacy systems, including Singapore's public sector, according to Chan. There is also a dearth of relevant IT capabilities, without which the journey toward digital transformation will be difficult.
In addition, policies need to catch up to an environment that is increasingly powered by the cloud, he said. Unless Singapore adopts a progressive attitude toward policies, brings in the best talent, and gets rid of legacy systems, any step forward could mean another two steps back.
This situation creates a compelling case to do something new, Chan said, pointing to the government's efforts to boost AI and cloud adoption. He said a new iteration of GCC will be equipped with higher security measures to enable more confidential and critical workloads to be moved to the cloud infrastructure.
Agritech company Jiva is also taking these kinds of precautions in its adoption of AI, including generative AI. Its mobile app recently introduced a new feature, called Crop Doctor, which lets farmers load images of crops to diagnose diseases and recommend relevant treatments that can be tailored to their requirements.
Asked if the company had concerns about tapping generative AI amid the reported security issues, Jiva's head of business strategy and partnership Aditya Thareja acknowledged there were worries about the potential risks. "We want to ensure things like hallucinations [occurring] are reduced to a small percentage. The last thing you want is to provide the wrong advice to farmers," Thareja said during a media briefing on the sidelines of the summit.
Jiva, which has operations in Singapore, Indonesia, and India, built Crop Doctor on Google's Vertex AI, tapping computer vision and image processing to identify crop diseases and causes, such as potassium deficiency. It recommends treatments based on an in-house data library
To mitigate potential risks, Thareja said the large language AI model is trained on only data that is sourced and vetted by Jiva. The generative AI model does not scour public data from the internet, he stressed, adding that the company continuously finetunes the prompt-engineering capability to ensure the right answers are provided.
Crop Doctor was tested on WhatsApp with 25,000 farmers before the feature was launched on Android in Indonesia, where the mobile OS has the highest penetration. Jiva currently has 125,000 farmers on its registry in the Asian market.
An earlier iteration, called Crop Care, also provides treatment recommendations based on crop images, but does not customize these results based on a farmer's specific access to the required components.
According to Jiva, Crop Doctor currently clocks an accuracy rate of above 90% for common major crop diseases, if the picture is in focus and the subject matter is correctly identified. The agritech vendor told ZDNET it continues to collect images from real-world cases from farmers to further improve the accuracy rate.
AgriCentral focuses on delivering useful and intuitive features to the millions of farmers who have already downloaded the app, including price comparison and tracking tools, accurate weather and weather forecasting, and agriculture-focused forum where farmers can discuss issues and get expert help, and much more. AgriCentral harnesses state of the art technologies such as global positioning, satellite imagery, big data analytics, machine learning, and image analytics to usher farmers into the era of digital farming.
AgriCentral has thus far exhibited impressive growth in the Indian market and continues to deliver value to its users. We look forward to close collaboration with AgriCentral in the months and years to come!
Check out AgriCentral’s features:
Market View: Over 5,000 price-points, the largest in the market, to provide farmers with daily price information for a variety of crops, right on their phones.
Crop Care: A combination of image identification and symptom based diagnosis to help farmers understand which pests, diseases or deficiencies are present among their crops.
Bulletin: Bulletin is a one-stop shop for all agricultural and agri-business related news. Farmers can stay updated with local, national and global developments, as well as the latest government schemes.
Farm Voice: A question-and-answer, forum-style platform that allows farmers to interact with both their peers from across the country and Agri experts for resolution of agronomical queries.
Crop Plan: With just a sow date and crop type, CropPlan gives farmers a personalised calendar of activities to be done to get a better yield at a lower cost.
Weather Forecast: Accurate daily weather forecast with hourly breakdown and intuitive display of relevant agricultural data, such as rainfall and humidity. The feature includes a 15-day forecast to aid farmers in planning and execution of critical farm activities.
AgriSense: AgriSense allows farmers to seamlessly search for specific products and quantities and create orders. Farmers can then review offers and connect with sellers to close the deal.
Learn more about AgriCentral by visiting their website or LinkedIn
Interested in Jiva? Follow us on Linkedin and Twitter or reach out at hello@jiva.ag
Why does Jiva provide financing to farmers?
Jiva provides financing to farmers because many factors that hold smallholder farmers below the poverty line derive from a lack of access to fair, low-cost financing. Provision of capital to a farmer allows them to reinvest in the farm through the purchase of high-quality supplies, branded chemicals, and critical fertilisers.
We found through our research in many rural farming communities, from India to Indonesia to West Africa, that the problems begin when the farmer does not have the cash they need to purchase supplies for their farm. Between payment from the previous cycle and the beginning of the next, earnings have been spent supporting family and community needs. Now, the farmer must rely on traditional banks, who are unlikely to be present in the community and unlikely to lend without proper documentation, or on local traders, who often charge exorbitant rates.
The farmer is then forced to go with the local trader. They elect to buy low-quality supplies in order to spend as little as possible to avoid more charges. The low-quality supplies yield a meager harvest and damage the soil, reducing the farmers' profit. In order to make ends meet, the farmer takes out another loan. They unknowingly enter a cycle of debt.
At Jiva, we aim to break this cycle by providing financing, in the form of digital “advances” to our farmers. Once a farmer signs up and is verified through Jiva’s app-based approval system, Jiva adds an advance amount to the farmer’s profile. The farmer can then only use that advance at Jiva’s e-commerce store, which stocks and delivers trusted, brand-name seeds and other supplies. The low- or no-cost advances allow the farmer to “buy now, pay later” without the exorbitant rates. At harvest, the Jiva Agent simply deducts the amount used for inputs from the total price of the harvest.
Our system of digital, non-fungible financing ensures that funds meant for the farm are used only for farm supplies, that those supplies are trusted, and that farmers avoid exorbitant rates that can quickly lead to financial hardship.
What’s next?
Jiva is constantly reviewing the designs, features, and delivery methods of our products. As we continue to extend advances to farmers across South Sulawesi, we remain committed to speaking directly with our users and Jiva Agents, improving our products and services, and creating value for millions of farmers around the world.
Interested in Jiva? Follow us on Linkedin and Twitter or reach out at hello@jiva.ag
Pak Saripuddin typically grows ~3 metric tonnes of corn on his 1 hectare field each cycle. After one season of following Jiva’s practical, feasible and personalized advice, he was able to grow 9.5 metric tonnes of corn.
To put that in perspective, that’s an entire year’s income earned in a single season!
Pak Saripuddin spoke with Jiva about his experience using the application, trying new practices, and adopting new behaviours. Like hundreds of farmers we’ve spoken with, Pak Saripuddin relied on agronomic advice from his peers. This is a common practice for many reasons, one of which is the lack of access to information about farming that is personalised to their crops maturity, easy to understand and feasible for smallholder farmers to adopt within their financial and labor limitations. Jiva’s advice, which focuses on micro-interventions throughout the season that lead to big improvements at harvest, were simple and doable. Though reluctant to change his common practices, including seed type, row spacing, and how to treat certain pests effectively, he’s ultimately glad he did.
Pak Saripuddin’s results are incredible, but they are not uncommon in underserved communities, where small changes can lead to enormous improvements. Imagine what would happen if the 500 million+ smallholder farmers around the world had access to Jiva’s advisory, financing and logistics services. Imagine how food systems, communities, and lives could change for the better.
Interested in Jiva? Follow us on Linkedin and Twitter or reach out at hello@jiva.ag
Here’s how it works:
The results
We conducted demo plot experiments with 135 individual farmers across 5 regencies, all with approximately 1 hectare of land. We did not control for many factors, including elevation, land slope and environmental factors such as drought and flooding.
We’re thrilled to say that preliminary data from these demo plots shows that 85% of our farmers increased their yield, with an average increase of over 40%! These are unprecedented figures, particularly from experiments in semi-controlled environments. From reinvesting in the land to paying off cyclical debt and even sending children to school, 40% is life-changing.
Interested in Jiva? Follow us on Linkedin and Twitter or reach out at hello@jiva.ag
This result, after a single operating season, is unprecedented for a new entrant in a trust-based market where traditional relationships trump newcomers and human interactions are favoured over digital interfaces. We believe this achievement indicates that Jiva’s hybrid human-technology delivery model is working and that our users and agents find value in our products.
How does Jiva differ from traditional harvest buying?
Jiva differs from traditional methods of harvest purchase in several key ways. Read on to learn more:
Interested in Jiva? Follow us on Linkedin and Twitter or reach out at hello@jiva.ag
Over three growing seasons, Jiva grew from an unknown entity to commanding an average 30% market share in our target regencies.
● We conducted hundreds of hours of user interviews.
● We met with political leaders, spoke at global innovation summits, and were recognized by name in Singapore’s national budget address.
● We studied the effects of our advice on over 100 farmers and found that 85% saw an increase in yield, with an average increase of 40% per farmer.
● We reviewed, rebuilt, and shipped an entirely new app to better support our agents.
We did the math and found that in just one year, we…
● Purchased 42 MILLION kilograms of maize
● Paid US$14 MILLION to farmers for their crops
● Provided over US$2 MILLION in low-cost financing to nearly 8,000 farmers
…And we’re just getting started on our journey to re-imagine agricultural and food systems and empower hundreds of millions of farmers around the world. We look forward to carrying our momentum into 2022 and beyond.
Interested in Jiva? Follow us on Linkedin and Twitter or reach out at hello@jiva.ag
Christine Tan (CT): You have steered Olam through many crises. When you look at the fallout in commodity prices. How would you compare the impact the agri-food industry is feeling from the current pandemic?
Sunny Verghese (SV): This is clearly for me the worst crisis that I’ve faced in my lifetime. The crisis has four clear shocks. The first, obviously, is the health shock. The problem with the health shock is that there is so much unknown. The probabilities are very uncertain. The outcomes are unbounded. So, it is very difficult to model and do any kind of scenario planning. So, our first priority is towards protecting the safety and lives of our employees. We have 89,000 people in 67 countries. So, our first focus priority is to keep them safe.
The second is really to make sure that we’re able to service our customers in a safe and healthy way for all the food, ingredients, feed and fiber products that they need. The second big shock that we see is demand shock. Fortunately, 85 percent of our portfolio is in food and feed ingredients, and that is very recession proof. People have got to eat even in a recession. Therefore, we have been quite fortunate in terms of our sector and our business of not having a significant demand erosion that we see in some of the other sectors. However, within that, the feeding regions that we are supplying to which goes to out of home consumption or dining consumption vigils and restaurants and quick service restaurants of full-service restaurants or cafes, those have clearly come off. We also see demand for discretionary food items quite subdued. But the center of the plate food items — the food that is essential like food staples — demand is actually going up because of pantry restocking effect at the consumer household level and at the retailers as well.
The third shock that we are contending with is the supply side shock in our industry. In our industry, that is a bigger shock than the demand shock, and that is because of the forced lockdowns and the regulatory restrictions. We have many supply chain disruption impacts. So, we find it difficult to get labor for our farming and upstream operations. We find it difficult to get labor for our logistics, manufacturing and factory operations. Therefore, our production is not at full capacity in many of these countries, although we have been saved from some of the worst aspects of supply chain disruption because our industry and our operations in many of these countries are deemed to be essential. Therefore, we were given the permission to operate through the crisis. But we had logistics issues, labor-related issues and other things that disrupted our supply chain.
The final shock is really the financial market shock, with credit to smallholder farmers, provision of inputs to smallholder farmers — and this is the Northern Hemisphere’s main planting season — those were substantially dislocated as well. So, cost of credit for smallholder farmers has gone up significantly, the availability of credit has come down, and all of these financial market accelerants including currency devaluations — many of these countries have suffered significant currency devaluations, whether it’s in Brazil, whether it is in Nigeria, Ghana and many parts of Asia as well — that has meant for imported food, price inflation has occurred. Therefore, consumers are finding it difficult to afford food. Just to give you an example, Africa alone, 150 million people have lost jobs during this crisis. Each of them supports a household size of four to five dependents, which means we have about 600 to 750 million people who have completely lost their jobs or significantly reduced the amount of time that they can really work. 60 to 80 percent of their consumption expenditure of these folks are in food consumption… are allocated to food consumption and therefore, increase in food prices as a result of currency devaluation and the supply chain disruptions has resulted in many of them having to eat less calories than they used to or eat less nutritious foods.
Also, you’ve seen in some parts of this in many parts of emerging Asia and Africa, schools have been completely closed and locked down. In many parts of Africa, children get their only meal as known day school meal program and that that has also got discontinued. And many of the children are now under the threat of having to go back and work on farms. So, child labor issues are going to increase.
CT: In your mind, Sunny, is the world now seeing a global food crisis as a result of the pandemic?
SV: The world is well supplied in terms of food. But the accessibility of that food, the affordability of that food, the food being wasted are the bigger issues. That is why we are worried that in developing economies and in emerging economies where people are losing their jobs and there isn’t a job support program like in the developed world to protect their incomes. In many of these countries, if they don’t earn their daily wages, they have no way of eating on that particular day. They are daily wage earners, they are in the frontline. If they don’t get paid and they don’t get to have work on that day, they can hardly feed. So, if you look at the World Food Programme, they have now estimated that at the end of 2019, we had 135 million people around the world who are at the level C stage of food insecurity, which means they can only survive if there is some external food assistance. Because of the COVID pandemic, they have now estimated there’s another 130 million people added to the level C stage of food insecurity. So, the health pandemic has now become a hunger pandemic because people are not able to access the food which is in plentiful supply but not able to reach them or they can’t afford it.
CT: What lessons did you learn that helped you respond quickly to the Coronavirus pandemic?
SV: Because the epidemiology on this virus is still being discovered as we speak, whether it is going to be airborne is the question. Is it aerosol? Is it droplets? We thought it was only droplets. Now we’re talking about aerosol. So, I think there are many things about this virus that we don’t know. What is clear is that people have to take individual responsibility, and how do we educate people who we can’t reach — the farmers in a lot of the countries that we operate? In the past, we had an army of extension officers on the ground who could go and visit them and personally train and educate them on good agricultural practices. But now, with the social distancing requirements and the inability to meet people in groups, we have to really innovate and try and do this by digitizing precautionary conditions that the communities in these countries have to observe in terms of safe distancing or wearing masks or hand washing and providing them this stuff, because there isn’t masks, gloves, hand sanitizers or obviously hospital facilities, or availability of ventilators, so Olam has worked very hard in identifying the vulnerable areas within our supply chains. We have spent almost $6 million now to provide protective equipment, to use our digital tools and mechanisms to train and educate farmers, households and their communities. We’ve reached about 560,000 farmers, despite all of these lockdowns and restrictions to help them understand how to be safe. That, I think, has been the biggest impact that we have been able to create within our supply chains, within the farmers and villages that we work in.
CT: Among the regions that you operate in, Africa is obviously one of the worst hit during his pandemic reporting one of the highest increases in new infections. Olam sources commodities like coffee, cocoa, cashew, even rice in plantations across western and east Africa. What’s the status of your operations there?
SV: We operate in about 24 countries in Africa. Our first focus is to help the most vulnerable parts of the population, to get them food. We want to amplify and supplement the efforts of the World Food Programme to provide our farming communities and suppliers food on time for them to have a nutritious meal. We are seeing how we can plug in and play an important role by leveraging our reach and our relationship with these farmers in these rural communities. So, that is the first thing.
The second is we want to make sure that the farmers get the production inputs they need, because this is the crux of the planting season, the height of the planting season, and they need access to fertilizers, improved seeds and varieties. They need agronomic advice. They need crop protection chemicals. You’ll see that one million acres have been lost in East Africa as a result of a locust infestation -and the locust swarm which has significantly impacted food production in that part of the world.
The third is really labor availability because many of the workers are not able to come and work on the farms. So, how can we help them mechanize or improve the productivity so that they can cope with that situation. Market access is a big problem because the factories are shut. Many of them are wasting the produce because it cannot reach a factory or there is no off-take in the factory. So, how do we provide storage or how do we help off-take the produce of the farmers producing, even if it is not going to be a commodity that Olam deals in, but can we provide a solution in terms of market off-take to the farmer. The farmers are struggling to access credit at this point in time because of Covid, so how do we help provide microfinance and credit to the farmers? So, these are some of the things that we have to focus in terms of the immediate actions that need to be taken, and we are leveraging our configuration of assets, people and reach to make an impact in all of these areas.
CT: Let’s talk more about labor, and you brought it up as well. There are reports that a pandemic has caused a labor shortage and that in turn is impacting crop harvest. To what extent is this affecting the yields at your farms? Are you seeing a lot of these farmers dump their crops because yields are so low?
SV: So, in fresh produce as well as in fresh livestock production, you’re seeing farmers having to actually dump stocks because the abattoirs are closed, the meat processing facilities are closed, or the fruit processing facilities are shut down or closed. So, in many countries, there is an increased food loss as a result of lack of demand or as a result of supply chain disruptions with factories and logistics being shut down. So, that is definitely happening in many parts of the world. Definitely, it is accentuated or amplified in Africa. So, keeping the supply chains open and helping keep the supply chains open is critical.
Let me give you one quick example. In Ethiopia, in our coffee supply chains, farmers or labor who come to pick the coffee are now expecting their wages to be at least doubled because food prices in that locality — because some of the food has to be imported and not locally produced and with what is happening to currency, etc. — the local prices of that food have gone up significantly. So, they are saying that unless their wages go up, we can’t even afford to eat. If we can’t afford to eat, we cannot come to work. So, you can see that there are ramifications in terms of how all of these interconnect and we have to provide a holistic solution and support for the farmers. But let’s get to the first milestone of getting the global community to support Africa in providing what the World Bank is saying is the $115 billion dollars that is required because they don’t have job support programs. So, if people are out of jobs, they are out of work, they are out of wage, they can’t eat or feed their households.
CT: We know that Olam is the world’s largest or leading raw cashew nut trader. When you look at a pandemic, it has caused havoc on demand. Border closures have simply meant that major buyers from Asia can’t travel to West Africa. How much pressure is this having on cashew prices? Is cashew farming now becoming unprofitable?
SV: Cashew prices have definitely declined. Even before the crisis, it was declining because of excess supply. The crisis has sort of accentuated it. Prices are still at about the cost of production levels. But definitely, farmer profitability has significantly come down as a result of much lower cashew prices. Demand for cashews is being impacted only at the margins, not major substantive decline in demand, but it is more the supply chain disruption issues and its excess supply that was there before the crisis, that the overhang continues. As a result, prices are lower.
CT: Olam is also one of the world’s largest coffee traders as well. Before the pandemic, coffee prices were already at record lows. Now, with the pandemic, cafes are shut, restaurants are shut. To what extent has this exacerbated the coffee crisis? Are you seeing more coffee farms go out of business?
SV: Coffee prices at these levels in many countries are below the cost of production. Brazil, which is the world’s largest coffee producer and the marginal cost producer, although coffee prices came down, the Brazilian real devalued considerably. As a result, in U.S. dollar terms, the Brazilian farmer as a result of the Brazilian real depreciation is still able to make money. But on the demand side, as you mentioned earlier because some part of coffee consumption is out-of-home consumption in restaurants or cafes like Starbucks or Costas or whatever, the lockdown and the shutdown of out-of-home consumption in restaurants and cafes has come down, have definitely impacted the demand for coffee.
CT: How much pain are coffee farms feeling at the moment?
SV: In many parts of the world, including other parts of Latin America and even in Asia, coffee prices today are below our farmers’ cost of production and therefore, we will see a reaction from the growers and the farmers of applying less fertilizers or taking less care of the crop. Therefore, we will see a cyclical downturn in production and we will see, therefore, coffee prices, once the global crisis is out of the way and demand, is restored cyclically then it adjusts itself. But at this point in time, coffee farmers around the world are suffering because their cost of production in many cases is higher than the current coffee prices.
CT: Are you doing everything at Olam to keep them in business?
SV: Yes, significantly. I can give you many examples: D.R.C., the Democratic Republic of Congo — we ordinate and source some specialty coffees and we have a cooperative for our specialty coffee called Virunga in one of the remote areas in DRC where we have 11 hundred women workers working in our factory there. We have increased their wages by 25 percent, and that is higher than anybody else in the industry. We are providing them free meals and we are providing them a clean safe working environment with all of the clothing precautions that we need to offer. Similarly, in another region of DRC as well, we are supporting 11 hundred coffee farmers. I’m just giving you some examples, but we are doing this at scale. We are reaching more than 560,000 farmers in various countries with various Covid support programs and packages to help them, their families and those communities.
CT: Sunny, you know, I love my chocolate and Olam is the world’s third largest processor when it comes to cocoa. When you look at the pandemic and how things have really taken an impact on supply chain, your customers include some of the world’s top makers of bulk chocolate, has the pandemic brought down chocolate consumption?
SV: Chocolate in some sense, is also comfort food, so people during crises in the past actually consumed more chocolate. But this time, what we’re seeing is because of the lockdown, for example, the airports are all shut down. People buy a lot of chocolates at the airport as gifts when they travel. So, we can see that demand for chocolates in the recent past has soften compared to many years of strong consumption growth. We see some softness in demand as a result, mainly of shut down. Retailers were shut down, so people can’t go and buy chocolates as easily as they could do before the lockdown. All of these things are happening, which has resulted in demand coming down in the recent past, actually, in the latter half of this crisis. In the first half of this crisis, we still had fairly solid demand. But as the lockdowns took hold across the globe, it offered less opportunities for consumers to indulge in their favorite pastime of eating chocolates, and we can see that the impact of some restrained demand in the recent past on chocolate consumption.
CT: Whether it’s cocoa, cashew or coffee, where do you see overall demand? You say right now it is pretty constant, but do you worry that in future, if the pandemic continues to drag on, it might start to hurt the purchasing power of the very consumers you’re trying to sell to?
SV: I think that will vary from country to country and the economic situation in each of these countries and what kind of COVID support packages are there. So, in the developed world, even if people are out of jobs, they’re given a job support program-package which allows them to maintain basic lifestyle in terms of consumption, et cetera. But in many countries where they can’t afford it, that is where the bigger crisis is. We are seeing very, very strong demand across our food staples portfolio. So, our wheat flour business, our pasta business, our rice business. So, across the food staples, we are seeing extremely strong demand. We are seeing good demand in our dairy business. We’re seeing very strong demand in our spices business. We are seeing quite strong demand even in the cocoa business so far — pretty strong demand and that business has done very well for us in the first quarter. We are going to be announcing our results soon. We are in a quiet period, so I can’t talk specifically about our results, but we have given an update at the end of the first quarter, a business update, and you can see that the cocoa business did well in that first quarter. 80, 85 percent of our portfolio is doing quite well. More of the industrial raw materials is where we have seen demand more significantly impacted. So, our cotton business, which is the fiber business, which is an industrial raw material going to textile industry, the textile mills have been closed down in many parts of the world. As a result, the capacity utilization rates in the textile industry has come down and that means demand for cotton fiber has come down, from a normal demand of 120 million bales per annum. This year, we expect the demand to come down to about 105 million bales, which is a significant contraction in demand. We see a contraction in demand for our rubber business, which is a de-prioritized business which we are planning to exit during this period. Rubber demand has come down because automobile demand has come down so tire demand has come down and therefore, rubber demand has come down. But in the food products, demand has only been affected where there is a big out-of-home consumption component or it is a very discretionary impulse purchase product. So, if it is a discretionary impulse purchase category, then demand is a little bit more impacted. If that is a significant segment of the consumption that goes into out-of-home consumption, then demand is also impacted there.
CT: So, in short, people really still need to eat and that’s why demand is still there for you. But when you look at your customers, are they starting to source more domestically and locally because of the supply issues? Are they changing where they get ingredients from?
SV: Yes, you’ve hit a very important point and that is happening. But I have to say that that trend, which I call de-globalization trend, was beginning to take shape even before Covid, primarily triggered by the trade war or the trade wars between the U.S. and China, between the U.S. and Europe, and the increased protectionist measures that different countries, as a result of the trade war, were beginning to start imposing tariffs and counter tariffs. So, we were already seeing a trend toward de-globalization and therefore many, many customers were trying to sharpen or near shore the supply chains rather than have offshore supply chains and particularly having full dependency or high dependency on one origin or one country to source their requirements from.
So, we already had seen that trend, but Covid has dramatically catalyzed that. We believe that post-Covid, that trend will accelerate, of people saying that we have been focused in designing our supply chains for cost efficiency and optimizing these supply chains for cost but we can’t do that any longer. We have to optimize the supply chains for resiliency and not only efficiency, but reliability and resiliency. So, we are seeing a big shift in efforts of customers to shorten supply chains. Even in the food sector, you can see many countries are saying that we can’t be dependent on our food consumption from far, faraway imports, because in this crisis, 14 countries imposed food export restrictions which accounted for roughly four percent of global calorie consumption was impacted by export restrictions that many countries put during the Covid crisis at the beginning of the crisis. Many of them are now unwounded, but that impacted food prices as well.
Therefore, consuming countries are saying that we have to have buffer stocks, we should arm upon resilience and we should have more security of food supply. We should produce more locally. You can see that the Singapore government now has a plan of producing 30 percent of its food by 2030. Similarly, many countries are saying that we cannot depend on hundred percent of our food requirements from imports and from faraway supply chains given these kinds of developments. So, de-globalization is going to be a trend that is going to continue for this as well.
CT: I know you’re in a quiet period, so you can’t talk about earnings, but as a global agri-food giant, you have a good pulse on the global economy. What’s your sense of when a recovery will take place? When do you expect things to start normalizing again?
SV: So, as I said at the beginning, Christine, this is a problem, statistically speaking, with unknown probabilities and unbounded outcomes. So, nobody knows whether we will have a big second wave, as is expected in the first quarter of next year at the height of winter. Because of what we are seeing in terms of the resurgence of cases in many, many countries, it’s still the first wave. Because of unknown probabilities, unbounded outcomes, it’s very difficult for anybody to forecast.
My own personal view is quite a bearish view. I think the economy is being propped up and supported by unprecedented monetary and fiscal support that is being provided by many governments that can afford it and that is what’s keeping the economy afloat at this point in time. So, the question is, why are asset prices in terms of stocks and other asset prices going up the way they are going up if the real economy, as you see from the IMF updated forecasts in July, they have revised the forecast down by almost 2 percentage points, 1.9 percentage point, and saying that the global economy this year will contract 4.9 percent, with the advanced economies contracting 8 percent and the developing economies, emerging economies are contracting about 3 percent.
CT: Are you saying the worst is yet to come?
SV: I am saying that we came down in this pandemic as far as the economy is concerned, we rode it down on an elevator, but we are going to recover climbing back the stairs. I do not believe that there’s going to be a V-shaped recovery. I think our recovery will be patchy. It’ll be uncertain and prolonged.
CT: As chairman of the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, what are you doing to build a more reliable and more stable food system that can weather sharp knocks and sharp breaks in the supply chain due to events like COVID?
SV: So, the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, as you know, WBCSD is a CEO-led coalition. We have about 200+ CEOs from across the world, across sectors as members, and we are trying to usher in a transition to a more sustainable one. One of the big trends that started pre-Covid but which will accelerate post-COVID is the move towards becoming more sustainable. I think there is a heightened sensibility that the way we did business in the past is not going to serve us going forward. We have to do more with less. So, coming to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, we are trying to achieve systems transformation across six meta systems. One is climate and energy. The second is waste and circular economy. The third is food and nature. The fourth is mobility, particularly urban mobility and urbanization. The fifth is about the people and the future of work. And the sixth is about redefining value: how we measure value and performance in companies because what we measure is what we manage. So, we are trying to achieve systems transformation across these six areas which we believe will help us meet our purpose of ushering in a transition to a more sustainable one.
CT: So, you’re saying that COVID has accelerated the sustainability agenda?
SV: Dramatically catalyzed and changed the sustainability agenda. Our membership has never been stronger than right where we are — the commitment that the member companies have towards contributing and pivoting significantly as a result of Covid. Covid has definitely catalyzed that. This is one of the big trends that is going to accelerate post-Covid. And our companies are now bringing the action gap between what they have announced as goals and really taking concrete action to achieve the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals within the planetary boundaries framework, recognizing that the three biggest challenges that confront us this century is climate emergency, the biodiversity collapse and the growing inequality. Also, we are seeing digitalization as another big, big trend. Accessing farmers in remote areas, smallholder farmers doing it only physically through an army of field agents, we are now found innovative digital ways of reaching the farmer. We are developing something called an agronomy nudge brain, which advises the farmer through remote sensing technology — each individual farmer on what is the next best action that he can take on his farm. This is using machine learning and delivered digitally to him, but because the farmer does not read, etc., it is all through a voice brain informing the farmer or a visual instruction to help the farmer take the next best action on this farm on that particular day. So, I think there is a dramatic digitalization revolution that is happening in our sector and globally across sectors.
CT: At the start of the pandemic, Olam embarked on a restructuring exercise where you’re essentially going to split the businesses into two operating units. Is the pandemic causing a distraction for you in your reorganization efforts?
SV: We have announced where we are splitting the company into two distinct operating entities. One called Agri Food Ingredients which consists of on trend food ingredients which are natural, sustainable, traceable, that is cocoa, coffee, edible nuts, spices, dairy. Another distinctly different entity, Olam Global Agri which is all about providing the food, feed and fiber requirements to a growing population, particularly in emerging markets in Asia, Latin America and Africa, leveraging on our traditional strengths of origination, processing, farming, et cetera. So, we believe that we will be able to get the right kind of investors or interested in these two themes which are complementary but different. Therefore, by making the business simple, more focused and less complex, the investors we hope to bring on board to invest in these two entities will re-rate the company and we will be able to raise additional capital to take these two entities to full potential. So, we are on track. We are following a sequenced stage-gated approach and implementing this. So, the first issue was for us to re-segment the business into these groups. The second stage is to reorganize in terms of the operating model design and the organizational design. We are well into that at this point in time. The third phase will be carving these two businesses out. The fourth and final phase will be to IPO these businesses or to list these businesses. So, we have said that it will take between 18 and 36 months to complete this exercise, but it’ll be in a sequence where we won’t do both at the same time. We will do it in a sequence way, and right now, we are on target to do that.
CT: So, pandemic or no pandemic, you will still spin off these two operating units eventually?
SV: Absolutely right. So, we are focused on that because we believe that it will unlock significant value, but more importantly, sustainable long-term value.
CT: And finally, as a co-founder and CEO of Olam International, what leadership will you provide to steer the agri-food giant out of this crisis?
SV: It’s not just me steering it out of this crisis, I have a great leadership team and great overall team in Olam. We have the strong support of our board and our shareholders. So, digitalization, sustainability will be the heart and engine while we differentiate these two businesses, OFI into a value-added ingredient solutions business and OGA into premier high return, high-growth food, feed and fiber business.
CT: Sunny, thank you so much for talking to me. Please stay safe and well during this time.
SV: Likewise, you also. Thank you very much.
END
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Jiva’s Makassar office will serve as the headquarters for South Sulawesi. The office will be a hub for our operations teams, who ensure that farmer loans and online inputs orders arrive at the right place and the right time. In addition, the Makassar office will serve as a key training centre, where the curriculum for our Jiva agents and farmers will be developed, tested, and launched!
The Jiva team is looking forward to making our home in Makassar and working hard for our farmers and Jiva agents.
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“To remain competitive, businesses will need to innovate and collaborate on a global scale. To support our businesses, I will invest in three key platforms.
a. The first platform is the Corporate Venture Launchpad, which will be piloted this year to drive new innovative ventures. This Launchpad will provide co-funding for corporates to build new ventures through pre-qualified venture studios. This is especially useful for larger businesses which want to rekindle a startup mindset within their organisations.
b. One such venture studio which I visited recently is BCG Digital Ventures. They collaborated with Olam, a Singapore food and agricultural multinational to build Jiva, a farmer services platform. This platform will help farmers in developing countries to increase crop yield, access credit, and connect directly to buyers. This venture helps meet the rising global food demand, while uplifting the income of farmers.
You can read the full address here.
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SINGAPORE — Around $24 billion will be spent over the next three years to help firms and workers adapt to the changing global landscape brought on in part by the pandemic.
The funds will go towards building a more vibrant business sector and innovation ecosystem, helping businesses to transform and scale up their operations, and creating opportunities for workers.
Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat said on Tuesday (Feb 16) that Singapore must deepen its position as a global-Asia node to emerge stronger from the Covid-19 crisis.
That will involve working to restore the country’s physical connectivity with the rest of the world, expand its digital connectivity and deepen its capacity to collaborate and innovate with global partners.
Singapore will invest in three platforms to help firms innovate and collaborate on a global scale, to help them remain competitive.
The Corporate Venture Launchpad will be piloted this year to drive innovative ventures, providing co-funding for companies to build new ventures through pre-qualified venture studios.
“This is especially useful for larger businesses which want to rekindle a start-up mindset within their organisations,” Mr Heng said.
He noted how BCG Digital Ventures, a venture studio, has collaborated with food and agricultural giant Olam to build a farmer services platform. The platform, Jiva, will help farmers in developing countries increase crop yield, access credit and connect directly with buyers.
The venture not only helps meet the rising global food demand, but also uplifts farmers’ incomes, he added.
In addition, the Open Innovation Platform will be enhanced to increase the speed and scale of digital innovation through new features such as a discovery engine. This will enable the platform to make automated recommendations as it helps to match problems faced by companies and public agencies with solution providers.
The platform also co-funds prototyping and deployment of solutions.
Enhancements will also be made to the Global Innovation Alliance, which helps to catalyse cross-border collaboration between Singapore and major global innovation hubs.
The network has 15 city links to the likes of Bangkok, Jakarta, London and San Francisco, and will be expanded to more than 25 cities over the next five years.
It will be given a boost by the Co-Innovation Programme, which will support up to 70 percent of qualifying costs for cross-border innovation and partnership projects.
The Singapore Intellectual Property Strategy 2030 is also being developed to support firms in commercializing the fruits of their innovation and help them in areas such as protecting and managing their intellectual property.
Further information on the strategy will be announced on World IP Day in April by the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore.
Strong connectivity will help businesses plug into global and regional supply chains and industry clusters, and deepen innovation partnerships, said Mr Heng, who is also Finance Minister.
Singapore has been stepping up its connectivity with Southeast Asian nations, he said, noting that the region has significant growth potential.
Among efforts to strengthen its links in the region include the inaugural Southeast Asia Open Innovation Challenge, which was launched last December. It drew participation from companies from countries including Indonesia and Thailand.
“We will continue to work closely with our Asean members, to enhance digital connectivity and cyber security, and to get ready for the fourth Industrial Revolution, building on initiatives such as the Asean Smart Cities Network,” Mr Heng added.
Singapore will also continue to enhance its infrastructure investments in the region, he said, such as through projects such as the Nongsa Digital Park to facilitate collaboration between Singapore firms and tech talent in Indonesia.
Singapore will invest in three platforms to help firms innovate and collaborate on a global scale, to help them remain competitive.
The Corporate Venture Launchpad will be piloted this year to drive innovative ventures, providing co-funding for companies to build new ventures through pre-qualified venture studios.
“This is especially useful for larger businesses which want to rekindle a start-up mindset within their organisations,” Mr Heng said.
He noted how BCG Digital Ventures, a venture studio, has collaborated with food and agricultural giant Olam to build a farmer services platform. The platform, Jiva, will help farmers in developing countries increase crop yield, access credit and connect directly with buyers.
The venture not only helps meet the rising global food demand but also uplifts farmers’ incomes, he added.
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The farmer services platform encompassed Jiva Agriculture and AgriCentral, a digital agri-advisory platform serving farmers in the Indian market.
Together under the Jiva umbrella but retaining their respective local brand names for continuity, Jiva Indonesia and AgriCentral will combine forces to reimagine food systems and reach millions of farmers around the world.
We are proud to welcome the AgriCentral team to Jiva and look forward to big growth, big ideas, and a big impact in the years to come.
For more information, see Olam International’s 2020 Annual Report
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At Jiva, we strive first and foremost to empower farmers and uplift their lives. Through our honest scales, accurate quality assessments, payment at the point of sale, and digital price comparison and breakdown tool, we ensure that selling to Jiva is a fair, stress-free, and efficient process. The tens of thousands of farmers who have trusted Jiva with their crops thus far only inspire us to improve for the next ten thousand…and the millions after that!
Jiva doesn’t just purchase crops. To best support the needs of our farmers, we offer four critical services to assist each farmer in all aspects of their trade, from pre-sow to post-harvest. The four services are:
Interested in Jiva? Follow us on Linkedin and Twitter or reach out at hello@jiva.ag
Smallholder AgriTech Southeast Asia Landscape 2021
Despite the outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic, AgriFood Tech startups raised more than US$26.1 billion in 2020, representing a 15.5% year-on-year increase. It was also the first time investment in upstream startups closer to the farm (eg. farm management systems, farm robotics, and agribusiness marketplaces) surpassed that of downstream in 7 years, according to AgFunder’s 2021 AgriFoodTech Investment Report.
The Smallholder AgriTech Southeast Asia Landscape focuses on high-impact technologies that impact smallholder farming. These startups have the potential to provide farmers with better access to information, markets, credit, and inputs, resulting in higher productivity and profitability. In 2020, Grow Asia identified five key agritech business models in Southeast Asia: Farmer Advisory, Peer-to-Peer Lending, Traceability, Digital Marketplaces, and Mechanization Platforms.
In the first session of Grow Asia’s Digital Learning Series for 2021, we will provide an update on the Smallholder AgriTech landscape in Southeast Asia and explore a widespread shift across the region as we see farmer advisory solutions explore adjacent business models in order to grow, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
For more information on GrowAsia, visit https://www.growasia.org/
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Jiva has successfully partnered with thousands of farmers across Indonesia to purchase over 5 MILLION kilograms of corn.
The tens of thousands of farmers who have trusted Jiva with their crops thus far only inspire us to improve for the next ten thousand…and the millions after that!
Jiva doesn’t just purchase crops. To best support the needs of our farmers, we offer four critical services to assist each farmer in all aspects of their trade, from pre-sow to post-harvest. The four services are:
Interested in Jiva? Follow us on Linkedin and Twitter or reach out at hello@jiva.ag
In South Sulawesi, as in many communities across the world, the end of the season is often celebrated with a harvest festival. In Bahasa Indonesia, these occasions are called “Panen Raya” and often include local ceremonies, demonstrations from seed and fertilizer companies, and visits from local leaders and politicians.
This season, Jiva sponsored a Panen Raya in Gowa. Some of our farmers and Jiva agents captured the event on video. Check it out!
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AgriCentral is a Jiva entity that offers a variety of advisory services for a variety of crops through their application, including:
The AgriCentral team created a video in honor of the milestone. Check it out here.
We are incredibly proud of AgriCentral’s success to date and look forward to all that is to come!
For more information on AgriCentral, visit their website or follow them on LinkedIn
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To celebrate this milestone, here are some of our favourite images from the lives of our users — farmers and Jiva agents alike. They are our most important asset and we look forward to growing with them for years to come.
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To mark the occasion, AgriCentral created a video to recap the journey to this point. Check it out here
With a strong presence in the Indian market and plenty of new features in development, AgriCentral is poised to reach new heights in the coming months. Stay tuned!
For more information on AgriCentral, visit their website or follow them on LinkedIn
Throughout the year, we opened three new offices (Makassar, East Java and Bengaluru) and hired nearly 200 people across 3 primary regions (Singapore, Indonesia and India)!
We look forward to continued growth in 2022 powered by our exceptional, diverse and dedicated team.
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Read below for Jiva’s feature in Singapore daily newspaper Lianhe Zaobao.
Maintaining food security and building sustainable food production and ecosystems have become important priorities as the world population continues to expand, paired with the climate change issues.
Since 2013, Temasek has invested more than US$8 billion (approximately S$11 billion) in 30 agri-food technology companies, hoping to use innovative technologies to help build a more resilient food system through the development of innovative agricultural technologies such as drip irrigation, synthetic biology, and less resource-intensive vertical farming.
Compared with 10 years ago, the ratio of investment in life sciences and agri-food to Temasek’s investment portfolio has risen significantly, from 1% to 10%. The return on investment has long-term growth potential and at the same time has a positive impact on global society.
Yeoh Keat Chuan, Temasek’s Vice President of Global Corporate Development and Vice President of Singapore Project Coordination, pointed out that climate change, the deterioration of the natural environment, and the increasing urban population have all posed major challenges to food and agriculture in Asia.
He continued, “Although the companies we invest in may be different, they share the same goal, which is to build a more resilient food system and reduce the carbon footprint of the agri-food industry. This also aligns with our long-term view of this field.”
Temasek, for example, has invested in Next Gen Foods, a plant protein product company based in Singapore. TiNDLE, the company’s initial product, makes chicken alternatives from nine natural materials like soybeans, wheat, and sunflower oil, lowering the amount of land required by 74%, greenhouse gas emissions by 88%, and water use by 82%.
Alternative proteins are also being developed by another Temasek-backed growth company, Growthwell. Protein extraction from chickpeas is the company’s patented method. In an interview, Justin Chou, executive director of the growth company, stated that chickpeas have all of the amino acids required by the human body.
Growing company: Creating alternative protein products and supporting environmentally friendly eating habits
Justin Chou, a lifelong vegetarian, also expressed his desire to develop alternative protein products that will encourage more people to become flexible vegetarians (flexitarians) and support more environmentally friendly eating habits.
As Asian societies become more prosperous, consumers are paying more and more attention to health and sustainable development, resulting in a significant increase in demand for food and food products in this area. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Rabobank, and Temasek recently released the 2021 Asia Food Challenge report, estimating that around US$1.55 trillion in investment will be required to meet Asian consumers demand over the next ten years.
In addition to innovative ingredients, Temasek is also aware of the importance of improving upstream productivity and efficiency in the food and food value chain. Temasek’s investment portfolio company, Olam International, has fostered a new venture, Jiva, which provides smallholder farmers with accurate and real-time farming information and microloans through a digital platform, and at the same time purchases smallholder farmers’ crops at market prices to help to protect the income of small farmers from being devoured and exploited by middlemen.
Jiva President, Ramanarayanan Mahadevan, pointed out in an interview that 525 million small farmers around the world grow 70% of the world’s food.
Integrated with technology such as machine learning systems and satellite data Jiva’s digital platform is able to predict the growth of crops in real-time. These predictions are only for specific farmers, and farmers nearby will get different predictions according to different seeds, sowing time, and planting locations.
If there are diseases and insect pests that farmers are not familiar with, they can use their mobile phones to photograph them and send the photos to Jiva. Jiva has also set up an e-commerce platform for small farmers to purchase the farming supplies they need at reasonable prices. This means that they can choose to buy agricultural supplies from Jiva and pay later.
In order to protect the interests of small farmers from being swallowed by middlemen, Jiva purchases crops from small farmers at market prices. Mahathir said that Jiva publishes the purchase price on the platform every day based on the market price, and small farmers can decide for themselves whether to trade at that price.
Jiva currently has a complete business model in Indonesia, with a total of 54,000 small farmers registered on the platform. Jiva also invested S$14 million to acquire 35,000 metric tons of crops and provided S$1.5 million in loans to more than 4,100 small farmers.
Although Jiva has 5.7 million users in India, at this stage it only launches personalized consulting services for small farmers.
Rome was not built in a day, Mahadevan said,
“Jiva’s model has been proven feasible in Indonesia, and the next step is to move in the direction of expansion.”
This includes providing services in more places and for more small farmers who grow different crops.
He wrapped up his statement with, “We will not just be satisfied with bringing changes to tens of thousands of small farmers, we have to bring substantial changes to millions of small farmers.”
Read the original article here: https://www.zaobao.com.sg/finance/singapore/story20211219-1223436
Last week, Jiva was featured in the Times of India.
He argues that to reinvent agricultural systems, we must borrow elements from popular consumer technologies. This strategy reduces the adoption hurdles for communities with low literacy and low technical fluency, as well as those who lack trust in technology. Ultimately he poses the question, why can’t Agtech become consumer tech?
Read on for a quote from the article:
“With simple, user-friendly technologies, we have the power to organise enormous tracts of data, package it and deliver it to users in a way that is dynamic, simple and highly personalised to their needs. As such, common consumer technologies are critical to the design and delivery of farmer-focused Agtech solutions. This is particularly true for those that underpin the apps we use everyday, such as advisory services, chat bots, AI-powered image recognition, digital loans and e-commerce stores. Platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp and Youtube are enormously popular among smallholder farmer populations. Why can’t AgTech borrow from these tools that farmers already know how to use? Why can’t AgTech become consumer tech?
Read the full piece here: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/voices/future-proofing-agricultural-systems-requires-user-centric-design-and-thoughtful-delivery/
But what makes a problem “wicked”?
By definition, a wicked problem is one that is difficult or impossible to solve due to its complex, ill-defined or contradictory elements. Often, “wicked” refers to a problem that does not have any singular solution.
These problems are caused and perpetuated by a dizzying web of interdependent forces. More often than not, these problems stack like nesting dolls, reinforcing one another and becoming more convoluted with time. In the case of rural agriculture, where economic and educational disparity collide with lack of access to technology, creating a working definition of the problem space can be a daunting task.
Seamus Tardif, Jiva’s Head of Growth, led several trips to Indonesia to give the team the opportunity to sit with community members — from farmers to traders to local officials — and speak about their experiences, successes and limitations within the current system. These trips ultimately defined our product strategy and the way we measure impact. Seamus explains, “What we’re battling is hundreds of years of a system that is stacked against these individuals. To make progress we must fundamentally change the way supply chains are structured, how value is distributed and how people acquire, accrue and apply knowledge. Ultimately, we are trying to change the odds in our farmer’s favor”.
To make progress we must fundamentally change the way supply chains are structured, how value is distributed and how people acquire, accrue and apply knowledge. Ultimately, we are trying to change the odds in our user’s favor
How does one begin to unwind generations of entrenched inequality and “change the odds”? Aria Nurfikry, Jiva’s Growth & Marketing Manager for Indonesia, believes that it all begins with trust. When discussing what surprised him about working with farmers, he noted, “the importance of the value of community in enhancing the credibility of our message. Trust is paramount in this market, and everything we do needs to drive towards building and reinforcing trust in Jiva within these communities”.
Building trust in a digital product, however, is not as easy as creating a simple and beautiful user experience or proclaiming a value proposition through a Facebook advertisement. For many who work and live in rural communities, inherent trust of, and comfort with, digital products do not yet exist.
Seamus explains, “we’re working with a population that has come online in the last 5 years. There is no such thing as a digital native. For hundreds if not thousands of years, these communities have operated without us. Our job now is to reframe technology as a tool for good; as something useful that can be relied on.” He continues, “Think about the developed world’s own adoption curve of technology. In the early 90s, very few of us understood its use cases. It usually took a friend or family member to demystify it”.
Jiva relies on a similar, community-first approach to build trust in our products. However, while many digital-first companies hope that organic referrals will lead to virality, we take a deliberate approach to employ key members of farming communities, whose deep relationships within local villages accelerate familiarity with, and adoption of, Jiva.
The familiarity that our on-ground team has with the lives of the farmers allow them to act as ambassadors of the service; they explain Jiva’s purpose, relate the use case to the individual farmer’s needs, and show farmers how to navigate the application. Instead of seeing a single, impersonal advertisement, farmers are likely to hear about Jiva from multiple known sources, building trust in the brand prior to adoption. Aria concludes,
“An omnichannel approach is critical because farmers need to know who we are; it’s easier to trust a friend who lives in your community than an application you’re seeing for the first time”.
Jiva’s growth team is therefore focused on designing, as Seamus describes it, “a softer approach to digital adoption”, through the deployment of on-ground community members who can ignite a self-perpetuating flywheel of trusted recommendations among disparate and hard-to-reach areas. Without this omnichannel approach, he notes, “it would take ten years to accomplish what we want to in two”.
At a fundamental level, this model seeks to minimize the amount of behavioral change required in adopting Jiva. By design, we ask an immense amount from our users: change your farming practices after decades in the field, buy your seeds online rather than at the local market, receive a digital loan, and do it all through a company you’ve just heard about. Employing friends and family of farmers as conduits of Jiva’s value and first-adopters of our products allows us to take a major element of this behavioral change — lack of face to face interaction — out of the equation. As Aria puts it, “our customer acquisition model allows us to be disruptive, but not prohibitively so”.
Ultimately, while Jiva is a startup that builds technology, our service will never be digital-only. Our relationships and actions within the community have an inherent physical component, and the experience of our farmers is heavily shaped by our employees on the ground. In fact, the majority of the user experience occurs between the farmer and these community employees, rather than between the farmer and the app screen.
Jiva’s engineers, designers, and product managers can build seamless and stunning digital experiences, but it’s the ability of Jiva’s on-ground network to truly embed the brand and its purpose within the community-conscious that drives customer acquisition, activation, and retention.
Wicked problems are complex and multifaceted. True progress against these problems requires a deep understanding of the lived experiences of the people that are subject to them — the big and the small, the universal truths and the personal nuances. Without that deep understanding, products, services and processes built for good may fail to reach critical adoption or address the true pain points felt by the user. In order to create lasting impact, we must meet our users in their communities, understand their pain points and treat them as partners in the evolution of our solutions. And all that begins with trust.
Seamus, when reflecting on Jiva’s community-driven growth model, concludes,
“A trust-first approach is not typical, but we aren’t trying to do something typical. When we crack the code and get millions of smallholder farmers to join us, we won’t be measuring impact in the number of users we have, but rather the step-change in power that their voice will have in the world”.
Christine Devlin: Aakash, thanks for taking the time to chat. Let’s begin with a bit of your background. You’ve been in startups now for over a decade — where’d it all begin?
Aakash Dharmadhikari: I began my startup career at a company called Burrp!, which was an early player in the food discovery scene in India — a bit like Yelp. The startup scene in India was in its infancy at the time, so moving from a corporate to a startup was less common than it is today.
C: Would it be fair to say that move was a little more risky? If so, what factors outweighed the risk for you?
A: I suppose it was riskier than staying at an established corporate, but risk didn’t play into my decision then. To be honest, risk hasn’t guided any of my career decisions. For that job in particular, it was the people. I remember coming away eager to work with the people who had interviewed me. You could tell they were no-nonsense, execution-oriented, and excited about what they were working on.
C: Looking back, what was the biggest change that you experienced after moving from a corporate to a startup?
A: The aspect of startup work that surprised me the most was the degree to which you have to work and think cross-functionally. When I started, I had focused solely on software development and the skills that job entails. Burrp! was my first time working with product managers, designers, content strategists, and others. I grew so much during that time due in large part to the exposure to other skill sets, functions, perspectives and priorities.
C: You then went on to co-found C42 Consulting with Niranjan, Jiva’s current CTO. Tell me about that.
A: C42 was a group of very eccentric, very smart people, some of whom have joined us at Jiva. We took on developer-centric consulting projects and built tools that are used globally today. But we had zero business sense and often went too deep on the build side. For example, we spent 6 months geeking out on Rubymonk, an e-learning platform for developers that saw 50,000 users on its first day. At the end of 6 months, we had perfected the code base but had no monetisation strategy. We decided that building products and consulting in parallel was difficult, so we handed the consulting business over to our employees and tried our hand at building our own app.
C: Was that app an extension of Rubymonk or a different product entirely?
It was a matrimony app for the Indian market, actually. Though there is demand for dating apps like Tinder, we felt there was an opportunity to serve the much larger traditional matrimony space. You can think about the delivery model as monster.com vs. LinkedIn, where a matrimony service is like the former and involves recruitment, a resume and interviews. We hypothesized that Matrimony, like LinkedIn, values the shared connections more than resumes.
We had no operational background at the time and ended up playing around with business models; was it a white label site, a data collection play, a freemium product? We pivoted about half a dozen times in a year before tabling it.
C: From an e-learning platform for developers to a matrimony app! How did you end up at GoJek?
A: After the experiment with the matrimony app, I returned to consulting for startups. Many of my friends were engineers at companies like Flipkart. At the time, there was a big shift from single, monolithic architectures to more agile, modern stacks in an effort to drive scale, deeper personalisation and better efficiency. My team and I took on those projects and eventually partnered with Sequoia, which gave us access to their portfolio of companies. It was through Sequoia that we began working with, and were ultimately aqui-hired by, GoJek.
C: At what point in this journey did you transition from engineering to product?
A: I had been working cross-functionally for a while, but didn’t officially label it until GoJek. I joined as an engineer at a time when we faced a high rate of churn in requirements. This made the engineering team appear inefficient, though the problem was the direction we were given. If you give incorrect blueprints to a construction team, and you have to ask them to demolish and rebuild the structure halfway through, are they inefficient? No, the issue is the architect.
I kept telling the CEO that he needed to rethink product management. After about 3 months he said, “Fine, if you know so much about it, you run it”. I said “Ok, sure” and that was that.
C: The product market fit for GoJek’s first product — ride hailing — was off the charts. Jiva is an entirely different ballgame. For us, product market fit can shift with each new crop and geography. How do you prioritise build?
A: From my perspective, Jiva’s product market fit is comprised of two components: Business Market Fit and Digital Product Market Fit. From a Business Market Fit perspective, there is no question: farmers, and the rural ecosystem more broadly, want this product. That is pure economics. The second piece, the Digital Product Market Fit, is what no one has solved and is part of the reason product at Jiva is so interesting.
So, we are focusing now on delivery of the digital product. We are asking ourselves, which features, design principles, elements of the user experience and engagement strategies will deliver exceptional, one-of-a-kind digital experiences to this user base? Prioritisation comes from, and evolves in response to, the answers to these questions.
At the end of the day, engagement is what matters. We want the parts of the business designed to engage users to scale rapidly and create leads for the parts of the business that drive revenue. We want those experiences to have impact and encourage retention, which then drives further engagement. That user model is no different than GoJek, among other platforms.
C: I think it’s natural to draw parallels between the two platforms as both operate logistics networks and rely on a hybrid human-technology model, but the end user and engagement strategies differ meaningfully. Talk me through the specifics of how Jiva and GoJek rely on a similar user model.
A: No question, Jiva’s end user and engagement strategies are unique. But below all that, both platforms rely on four key pillars. They are:
These four product pillars form the bedrock of Jiva and many other products. With a strong foundation, we have the opportunity to launch other services, add features, learn from the user, bring on partners and create a true ecosystem for all stakeholders.
C: That’s fascinating. It sounds like you have serious ambitions to build a rural superapp…
A: We’ll see!
C: One final question — From your perspective, what is unique and exciting about the product challenge at Jiva?
A: Product managers love two things: figuring out the current rules of the game and how to manipulate those rules to optimise their outcomes. At Jiva, the rules of the game are still being mapped, let alone optimised. And although there is a fair amount of “low hanging fruit” in rural agriculture, the complexity of the domain and its users mean operationalising those are not as easy. This complexity, coupled with the sheer impact it represents, is what makes product at Jiva so exciting.
Interested in applying for a role at Jiva? Check out our careers HQ, website or email us directly at careers@jiva.ag
“From a business perspective, the data asset that would result from a 10–15% market share would be unprecedented. No one has that data — not governments, not NGOs, no one. With that data, the possibilities for Jiva are endless. That in and of itself is a very exciting prospect.”
Christine Devlin: Niranjan, thanks for taking the time to chat. Let’s begin with your time at C42, the developer-consulting firm you co-founded. How did that experience shape you?
Niranjan Paranjape: C42 taught me a lot about running a business. The importance of survival has really stuck with me; if you want to see a business succeed — even if you have to bootstrap and hack your way to a product — you cannot ignore the short term tactical wins which keep business afloat. If the business fails to survive, your great long-term strategy won’t matter. This lesson applies to everything from team culture to product architecture.
C: When I spoke to Jiva CPO Aakash Dharmadhikari about his time at C42, he mentioned how easy it was fall down the engineering rabbit hole for months at a time, often without a business strategy. Did your experiences at C42 teach you a similar lesson?
N: Yes definitely. I learned a lot about leading a process and building with business in mind. There was a lot that I had to unlearn when I moved to GoJek, though. For example, at C42 we focused on doing one thing really, really well before broadening scope. At GoJek, demand was so high for our products that the strategy was reversed: the market was hot, so we built as many products as possible to see what would stick. From there, we’d scale. This is not a conventional strategy and really pushed me to be an organised team leader.
C: A Product Market Fit that is too strong? That’s a problem so many of us dream of.
N: It was exciting to see such a high demand for our product, but the problem was scaling our systems to meet that demand. When we introduced surge pricing, for example, we expected it to relieve some of the pressure on the application by reducing traffic. Instead, people just changed their travel patterns. That’s how much they liked the service. We had to build the organisation really quickly to meet the moment, scale and continue to deliver a reliable product.
C: In the case of those early GoJek days, how did you balance building for scale versus building for quality?
N: There are three parameters in every development project: scope, quality and time. If you pull one lever, the others must move. Leading effectively meant that I had to be very clear about that. If, for example, we were running up against a deadline, we would have to adjust scope in order to maintain the level of quality that our users were accustomed to. You have to be comfortable making a judgement call on what you’re willing to compromise.
C: Were there any particular moments when those three pillars were put to the test?
N: Plenty of times. One that is coming to mind was the challenge of re-writing the code that manages the driver’s location. A week or two after we re-launched the service, our driver base jumped from 20,000 to 150,000. If we hadn’t built that service in time, and if we hadn’t done it well, everything would have come to a screeching halt.
Another challenge was the insane speed of the GoCar launch. We wanted to launch it before Uber launched their motorcycle service. We had one month from inception to go-live. One month! It was literally myself and a few other folks on a whiteboard, drawing all the services and prioritising for the MVP one day and beginning build the next. That experience really taught me rapid, disciplined prioritisation.
C: How did you control the chaos during those early days?
N: I had the opportunity to hire my mentors, which helped a lot in controlling quality and consistency of builds. Many of us had worked closely together before and came to the room with very similar build strategies and philosophies. Beyond that, we had to pull ourselves out of the day to day execution when possible and focus on recruitment and expansion. The GoJek team in India grew 700% in 2,5 years.
What sold me on Jiva was the sheer potential for impact — the problem is so critical and the market is so large. In the next 10 years, we need to increase the average yield per hectare that these farmers produce in order to continue to feed the world. There are 525 million smallholder farmers alone. Plus, our product will impact not only the lives of the farmers but on all of us that rely on them, whether we realise it or not.
From a business perspective, the data asset that would result from a 10–15% market share would be unprecedented. No one has that data — not governments, not NGOs, no one. With that data, the possibilities for Jiva are endless. That in and of itself is a very exciting prospect.
C: There are a lot of misconceptions about the space, the problems farmers face and how to solve them. How has your understanding of the technical challenge changed since joining Jiva?
N: I think AgTech scares people because they think you need to have deep agronomic or supply chain knowledge. That’s not true. At the end of the day, this isn’t a deep tech problem or a precision farming problem. At least not yet. For the time being, the challenge is understanding, organising and codifying a complex domain. Once you understand enough to balance the sheer size of the sector with its nuances, you can build and deploy highly impactful and valuable products.
The positive side of the enormity of this domain is that demand is not an issue — we know farmers want and need these services. We need to find simplicity and scalability within the complexity in order to capitalise on that product market fit.
The other technological challenge worth mentioning is the lack of rapid feedback loops. At GoJek, we had near-live feedback for millions of transactions every day. At Jiva, we have to be more creative in sourcing feedback and analysing data, as our users are not digital natives and our digital touchpoints with the end user may be seasonal or more sporadic.
C: What’s next for tech and engineering at Jiva?
N: There are so many directions we’re looking to explore. At a fundamental level, we want to think about the future of Jiva holistically: how can we build the farmer community beyond advisory and supply chain? Top of the list includes mapping of farms to revolutionise the KYC process and increase financial inclusivity, deepen our relationship with farmers through access to weather, prices, e-commerce and leverage IoT sensors to provide information like soil health and predictive yield. For this space, there is no ceiling.
C: Finally, for those who may be interested in joining us, what is it like to work as an engineer in at Jiva?
N: I think candidates need to know that we are very much still a startup. Just like my early days at GoJek — I don’t have an answer to “What is the job?”. At Jiva, you can have whatever responsibility you want, but everyone needs to be present when things are bugging. Our Head of Farmer Services, for example, has spent his entire time at Jiva building our Supply Chain processes instead. We are ultimately working within very real biological cycles with changing conditions on the ground. We are constantly evolving in response. It is thrilling, but it’s not for everyone.
Interested in joining Jiva? Check out our careers HQ. For more information, visit us at jiva.ag or on Linkedin.
Jiva is building a suite of applications, products, and services to digitize the rural supply chain and bring rural farming into the future.
Jiva partners with both farmers and supply chain stakeholders from the planning stage to post-harvest, offering four key services:
Together these services address critical farmer needs and create efficiencies in the rural supply chain, unlocking substantial value for farmers, their families, and their communities.
525 million smallholder farmers grow 70% of the world’s food, yet are among the poorest and most underserved communities on earth. Moreover, rural farmers are some of the most vulnerable to the shifting conditions that result from climate change.
At Jiva, we know that increasing farmer yields, incomes, and access to information with modern technology will preserve smallholder livelihoods and strengthen their resiliency in a rapidly changing world.
We are passionate about our purpose to uplift the lives of our farmers. Each day we have the opportunity to build relationships with farmers and their families, design for their specific needs, and introduce technological solutions where none existed before.
Since the launch of our digital supply chain and advisory services in Indonesia in late 2020, we have grown to a community of tens of thousands of farmers and local stakeholders, extending hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit and purchasing millions of kilograms of harvest.
We are looking for exceptional engineering, product, and design talent to fuel our next phase of growth.
Interested in learning more? Check us out at www.jiva.ag or email us directly at hello@jiva.ag
Jiva was chosen to represent Indonesia and SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) - as a digital solution that helps the global community accelerate our progress in achieving zero hunger by 2030.
Ram presented how Jiva is helping smallholder farmers, who produce 70% of the world's food but are amongst the most hungry people in the world, by solving the multifaceted challenges they face every day: lack of access to technology, low level of digital literacy, unfair markets, and minimal opportunity to get financial services.
When we help solve these challenges, smallholder farmers will get better income and livelihoods - and when we make sure that the world's largest food producers are prosperous, we are on the fast track towards solving world hunger.
We are honoured to be a part of this noble mission of ensuring the achievement of sustainable development goals while making the world a little bit more equal for everyone.
Jiva’s Head of Growth Seamus Tardif explains in the article the great challenge of technology adoption within the smallholder farming community, our “phygital” (blend of physical and digital) approach, and how Jiva is using the latest technology to help make farming a more prospective, sustainable occupation to ensure food security.
Read the full article here: https://www.theedgesingapore.com/digitaledge/digital-economy/solving-global-food-crisis-technology
Since rice is a staple food for most people in Asia, the upcoming major rice shortage will put the region’s food security at risk. The global rice market is set to log its largest shortfall in two decades in 2023, according to Fitch Solutions’ Country Risk and Industry Research dated April 4. This is due to the knock-on effect of the ongoing war in Ukraine and bad weather in rice-producing countries like China and Pakistan. Consequently, the price of rice will average US$17.30 ($22.90) per cwt through this year and is likely to ease to US$14.50 per cwt only in 2024. (Cwt is a unit of measurement for commodities such as rice.)
Yields of other crops are also expected to be affected due to food distribution, energy and fertiliser shortages. This is why the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2023 identifies the food supply crunch as one of the biggest risks to the world economy in the next two years.
Using technology to modernise agricultural processes and enable data-driven decisions is essential to securing our food supply. In fact, the International Food Policy Research Institute predicts that data-driven agriculture techniques can increase farm productivity by as much as 67% by 2050 while simultaneously cutting down on agricultural and food losses.
Yet, less than one-tenth of farmers in Asia are using or planning to use at least one agriculture technology (agritech or agtech) solution in the next two years.
Seamus Tardif, head of growth at Jiva — a Singapore-headquartered agritech company operating across Indonesia and India — agrees that smallholder farmers tend to be hesitant to adopt technology as they may not fully understand the value of digitalising farming practices. “The challenge may not always be a lack of smartphones or connectivity, which are of course huge challenges, but it may also be a lack of education that technology can be used to help with their farming needs. For instance, we see many farmers using YouTube and Google for entertainment but not education. They will still ask their neighbours what they think the weather will be like tomorrow. Because of this, we’ve taken a more phygital [physical and digital] approach to getting our services to villages,” he says.
Smallholder farmers, he adds, need social proof before deciding to use technology to transform how they work. “Every change could result in a possible loss of income or breaking of a long-term partnership with local businesses. [So, these farmers will be motivated to transform only when they] see many others around them also changing.
“Also, smallholder farmers are keen to witness the benefits they can expect before they embrace technology. [This is why Jiva] runs demo programmes and invests in village systems by running educational roadshows. In Indonesia, we’ve directly educated over 20,000 farmers through on-the-ground roadshows and established “Jiva Villages” that showcase our 360-degree services. As we proceed, we collect testimonials, such as farmers who doubled their yield and income by following Jiva’s advisory and utilising Jiva’s input and harvest services. We can then share these powerful stories with other farmers to help alleviate their concerns,” he explains.
According to The World Bank, most smallholder farmers live below the poverty line, subsisting on less than US$2 a day. “There are four main reasons for this: Restricted access to high-quality farming inputs, lack of capital at critical moments in the farming cycle, information asymmetry at the time of sale, and improper farming practices,” notes Tardif.
To address this, Jiva provides easy access to high-quality farming inputs, offers credit facilities for farming inputs, enables harvest to be bought at fair and transparent prices, and provides agronomy advisory services for free. “By improving their livelihoods, we believe we can inspire the next generation of farmers and make farming a more profitable and sustainable occupation for generations to come, [which could help strengthen] food security,” he says.
Tardif explains that Jiva operates in a phygital ecosystem. “On the physical side, we work with rural entrepreneurs (which are farmers, collectors, and village-level retailers) and supply chain partners. On the digital side, we have three customer-facing mobile apps — one for each customer group: Farmers, retailers, and collectors. Moreover, we have an extensive automated back-end system for managing transactions, risks, and analytics, which are also made available to our field teams through internally-facing mobile applications.”
Jiva’s farmer app offers agronomy advisory services that leverage machine visioning (which is the ability of a computer to “see” images) and artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver real-time crop diagnoses and treatment recommendations by simply taking a photo. It also provides market pricing on key commodities to help farmers make informed decisions on when to sell and the price they can expect to receive based on their crop. “We will soon release a new large language model-based advisory service that draws from our extensive agronomy knowledge base to allow farmers to ask a variety of questions beyond pest and disease management. To purchase farming inputs and get access to credit, farmers can connect with one of Jiva’s collectors or retailers,” he says.
Meanwhile, collectors can use Jiva’s collector app to purchase harvest, sell inputs, and perform credit know-your-customer checks easily. The retailer app gives retailers access to Jiva’s extensive range of high-quality farming inputs such as fertilisers and agricultural equipment.
For its back-end systems, Jiva uses a variety of tech platforms and automation to assist with the management of inventory, transactions, risk, and services to farmers, collectors, and retailers. “Our credit risk assessment tool utilises AI to identify the risk level of each credit request and determine if Jiva should or should not accept a particular cash-advance request. This assessment looks at various events leading up to the request to determine the legitimacy of the request and the likelihood of default, regardless of whether a collector/farmer has been given credit in the past. The aim is to reduce default rates to ensure we can maintain a sustainable credit/cash-advance system.
“We are also evolving our pricing systems to incorporate predictive pricing through machine learning. This will look at the multiple years of the pricing data we have access to across commodities, as well as the current pricing trends and other factors, to help provide a pricing estimate for our operations management team to use to set our daily prices,” states Tardif.
In a recent survey of more than 200 respondents in Indonesia and India, farmers and collectors who leveraged Jiva’s services saw their income increase by 25%. Farmers who used Jiva’s agronomy advisory also increased their yields by up to 49%.
“Additionally, we have heard across multiple sources that Jiva’s commodity prices are now the benchmark of prices across our operating areas. This means that even those farmers who aren’t working directly with Jiva benefit from Jiva being in the ecosystem. We have worked hard to improve efficiencies in the agricultural supply chain and reduce the possibility of bad actors inflating margins, which has resulted in more value being driven back to the farmer,” shares Tardif.
Our Chief Technology Officer, Tejas Dinkar, explains how our field teams, with our network of farmers and agronomy experts, collected and annotated hundreds of thousands of images from the ground to train the AI model to identify crop pests and diseases and how to treat them.
Read the full article here.
By Eileen Yu, ZDNET Senior Contributing Editor
Organizations that want to harness generative artificial intelligence (AI) more effectively should use their own data to train AI systems, using foundation models as a starting point.
Doing so can provide more relevant context and allay concerns about the potential risks, such as inaccuracy and intellectual property infringements.
Accuracy, in particular, is a top priority for a company such as Jiva. The agritech vendor uses AI to power its mobile app, Crop Doctor, which identifies crop diseases via image processing and computer vision, and recommends treatments. It also taps AI to determine the credit worthiness of farmers who ask for cash advancements prior to a harvest and returns the loans when their harvest pays out.
It uses various AI and machine-learning tools, including Pinecorn, OpenAI, and scikit-learn, as well as Google's TensorFlow and Vertex AI. Jiva has operations in Singapore, Indonesia, and India.
It trains its AI models on thousands of annotated images for each disease, according to Jiva's CTO Tejas Dinkar. The agritech company has collected hundreds of thousands of images from the ground through its field teams and farmers who are part of Jiva's network and use its app AgriCentral, which is available in India.
Its field experts are involved in the initial collection and annotation of images, before these are passed on to agronomy experts who further annotate the images. These then are added to the training model used to identify plant disease.
For new crops or crops that its team of experts are less familiar with, Jiva brings in other platforms, such as Plantix, which have extensive datasets to power image recognition and diagnosis information.
It uses various AI and machine-learning tools, including Pinecorn, OpenAI, and scikit-learn, as well as Google's TensorFlow and Vertex AI. Jiva has operations in Singapore, Indonesia, and India.
It trains its AI models on thousands of annotated images for each disease, according to Jiva's CTO Tejas Dinkar. The agritech company has collected hundreds of thousands of images from the ground through its field teams and farmers who are part of Jiva's network and use its app AgriCentral, which is available in India.
Its field experts are involved in the initial collection and annotation of images, before these are passed on to agronomy experts who further annotate the images. These then are added to the training model used to identify plant disease.
For new crops or crops that its team of experts are less familiar with, Jiva brings in other platforms, such as Plantix, which have extensive datasets to power image recognition and diagnosis information.
Where there is a lack of robust AI models, humans can step back in.
For rare or highly specific crop issues, Dinkar noted that Jiva's team of agronomy experts can work with local researchers and field teams to resolve them.
The company's credit assessment team also overlays data generated by the AI systems with other information, he said. For example, the team may make an on-site visit and realize a crop is just recently ready for harvest, which the AI-powered system may not have taken into consideration when it generated the credit assessment.
"The objective is not to remove humans entirely, but to move them to areas they can amplify and [apply] adaptive thoughts, which machines aren't yet up to," Dinkar said.
Asked about challenges Jiva encountered with its generative AI adoption, he pointed to the lack of a standard prompt methodology across difference software versions and providers.
"True omni-lingualism" also is missing in LLMs, he said, while hallucination remains a key issue.
"Various large language models all have their own quirks [and] the same prompt techniques do not work across these," he explained. For instance, through refined prompt engineering, Jiva has been able to instruct its agronomy bot to clarify if it is unable to infer, from context, the crop that the farmer is referencing.
However, while this particular prompt performed well on GPT-3.5, it did not do as well on GPT-4, he said. It also does not work on a different LLM.
"The inability to reuse prompts across versions and platforms necessitates the creation of bespoke sets of prompt techniques for each one," Dinkar said. "As tooling improves and best practices emerge for prompting various large language models, we hope cross-platform prompts will become a reality."
Improvements are also needed in cross-language support, he said, pointing to strange responses that its chatbot sometimes generates that are out of context.
Singapore has carved out dedicated cloud resources so its government agencies can deploy artificial intelligence (AI) applications more efficiently and securely.
The cloud cluster has been established with the aim of driving up AI adoption in the public sector and supporting research into how AI can be applied, said the Smart Nation and Digital Government Office (SNDGO). It will also support local AI startups, according to the government agency.
Called the AI Government Cloud Cluster, the platform runs within a dedicated environment on Google Cloud, where the U.S. vendor's AI technology stack and partner applications are available for deployment. These resources include A2 supercomputers running on Nvidia's A100 GPUs and a repository of AI models, running first- and second-party as well as open source platforms, which government agencies can customize for their specific requirements. The AI models span multi-language text translation, audio-to-text conversion, and software coding.
Several global "shifts" have underscored the need for a new approach to technology, with AI and cloud playing key roles, according to Chan Cheow Hoe, SNDGO's government CTO and senior advisor for the Singapore Economic Development Board.
Speaking at the Google summit, Chan pointed to environment and technology changes and said people now want to know the impact digitalization has on the environment and on their personal security. More people are exposed to cybersecurity risks and investors want to see results, with businesses having to work harder for every dollar.
There are more significant trust and safety concerns compared to a couple of years ago, where fewer people cared about these issues, he said. There is also zero tolerance for downtime, where online services and apps that go down for an hour will make headlines.
With technology now omnipresent and touching every facet of daily life, Chan stressed the need to safeguard customers and citizens and ensure systems and services are trusted -- otherwise no one will want to use the technology.
There have also been big technological shifts and he pointed to cloud, alongside SaaS (software-as-a-service), and generative AI as the key ones that hold significance.
Heralding the Singapore government's cloud journey, which began seven years ago, Chan said the move was important not just for cost efficiencies, but also to provide access to a global ecosystem of the best technology resources. Organizations that do not open up to the cloud also risk running bespoke applications that might not be able to scale quickly and support faster times to market, he added.
However, many organizations remain straddled with legacy systems, including Singapore's public sector, according to Chan. There is also a dearth of relevant IT capabilities, without which the journey toward digital transformation will be difficult.
In addition, policies need to catch up to an environment that is increasingly powered by the cloud, he said. Unless Singapore adopts a progressive attitude toward policies, brings in the best talent, and gets rid of legacy systems, any step forward could mean another two steps back.
This situation creates a compelling case to do something new, Chan said, pointing to the government's efforts to boost AI and cloud adoption. He said a new iteration of GCC will be equipped with higher security measures to enable more confidential and critical workloads to be moved to the cloud infrastructure.
Agritech company Jiva is also taking these kinds of precautions in its adoption of AI, including generative AI. Its mobile app recently introduced a new feature, called Crop Doctor, which lets farmers load images of crops to diagnose diseases and recommend relevant treatments that can be tailored to their requirements.
Asked if the company had concerns about tapping generative AI amid the reported security issues, Jiva's head of business strategy and partnership Aditya Thareja acknowledged there were worries about the potential risks. "We want to ensure things like hallucinations [occurring] are reduced to a small percentage. The last thing you want is to provide the wrong advice to farmers," Thareja said during a media briefing on the sidelines of the summit.
Jiva, which has operations in Singapore, Indonesia, and India, built Crop Doctor on Google's Vertex AI, tapping computer vision and image processing to identify crop diseases and causes, such as potassium deficiency. It recommends treatments based on an in-house data library
To mitigate potential risks, Thareja said the large language AI model is trained on only data that is sourced and vetted by Jiva. The generative AI model does not scour public data from the internet, he stressed, adding that the company continuously finetunes the prompt-engineering capability to ensure the right answers are provided.
Crop Doctor was tested on WhatsApp with 25,000 farmers before the feature was launched on Android in Indonesia, where the mobile OS has the highest penetration. Jiva currently has 125,000 farmers on its registry in the Asian market.
An earlier iteration, called Crop Care, also provides treatment recommendations based on crop images, but does not customize these results based on a farmer's specific access to the required components.
According to Jiva, Crop Doctor currently clocks an accuracy rate of above 90% for common major crop diseases, if the picture is in focus and the subject matter is correctly identified. The agritech vendor told ZDNET it continues to collect images from real-world cases from farmers to further improve the accuracy rate.
SINGAPORE — Around $24 billion will be spent over the next three years to help firms and workers adapt to the changing global landscape brought on in part by the pandemic.
The funds will go towards building a more vibrant business sector and innovation ecosystem, helping businesses to transform and scale up their operations, and creating opportunities for workers.
Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat said on Tuesday (Feb 16) that Singapore must deepen its position as a global-Asia node to emerge stronger from the Covid-19 crisis.
That will involve working to restore the country’s physical connectivity with the rest of the world, expand its digital connectivity and deepen its capacity to collaborate and innovate with global partners.
Singapore will invest in three platforms to help firms innovate and collaborate on a global scale, to help them remain competitive.
The Corporate Venture Launchpad will be piloted this year to drive innovative ventures, providing co-funding for companies to build new ventures through pre-qualified venture studios.
“This is especially useful for larger businesses which want to rekindle a start-up mindset within their organisations,” Mr Heng said.
He noted how BCG Digital Ventures, a venture studio, has collaborated with food and agricultural giant Olam to build a farmer services platform. The platform, Jiva, will help farmers in developing countries increase crop yield, access credit and connect directly with buyers.
The venture not only helps meet the rising global food demand, but also uplifts farmers’ incomes, he added.
In addition, the Open Innovation Platform will be enhanced to increase the speed and scale of digital innovation through new features such as a discovery engine. This will enable the platform to make automated recommendations as it helps to match problems faced by companies and public agencies with solution providers.
The platform also co-funds prototyping and deployment of solutions.
Enhancements will also be made to the Global Innovation Alliance, which helps to catalyse cross-border collaboration between Singapore and major global innovation hubs.
The network has 15 city links to the likes of Bangkok, Jakarta, London and San Francisco, and will be expanded to more than 25 cities over the next five years.
It will be given a boost by the Co-Innovation Programme, which will support up to 70 percent of qualifying costs for cross-border innovation and partnership projects.
The Singapore Intellectual Property Strategy 2030 is also being developed to support firms in commercializing the fruits of their innovation and help them in areas such as protecting and managing their intellectual property.
Further information on the strategy will be announced on World IP Day in April by the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore.
Strong connectivity will help businesses plug into global and regional supply chains and industry clusters, and deepen innovation partnerships, said Mr Heng, who is also Finance Minister.
Singapore has been stepping up its connectivity with Southeast Asian nations, he said, noting that the region has significant growth potential.
Among efforts to strengthen its links in the region include the inaugural Southeast Asia Open Innovation Challenge, which was launched last December. It drew participation from companies from countries including Indonesia and Thailand.
“We will continue to work closely with our Asean members, to enhance digital connectivity and cyber security, and to get ready for the fourth Industrial Revolution, building on initiatives such as the Asean Smart Cities Network,” Mr Heng added.
Singapore will also continue to enhance its infrastructure investments in the region, he said, such as through projects such as the Nongsa Digital Park to facilitate collaboration between Singapore firms and tech talent in Indonesia.
Singapore will invest in three platforms to help firms innovate and collaborate on a global scale, to help them remain competitive.
The Corporate Venture Launchpad will be piloted this year to drive innovative ventures, providing co-funding for companies to build new ventures through pre-qualified venture studios.
“This is especially useful for larger businesses which want to rekindle a start-up mindset within their organisations,” Mr Heng said.
He noted how BCG Digital Ventures, a venture studio, has collaborated with food and agricultural giant Olam to build a farmer services platform. The platform, Jiva, will help farmers in developing countries increase crop yield, access credit and connect directly with buyers.
The venture not only helps meet the rising global food demand but also uplifts farmers’ incomes, he added.
Interested in Jiva? Follow us on Linkedin and Twitter or reach out at hello@jiva.ag
To mark the occasion, AgriCentral created a video to recap the journey to this point. Check it out here
With a strong presence in the Indian market and plenty of new features in development, AgriCentral is poised to reach new heights in the coming months. Stay tuned!
For more information on AgriCentral, visit their website or follow them on LinkedIn
Why does Jiva provide financing to farmers?
Jiva provides financing to farmers because many factors that hold smallholder farmers below the poverty line derive from a lack of access to fair, low-cost financing. Provision of capital to a farmer allows them to reinvest in the farm through the purchase of high-quality supplies, branded chemicals, and critical fertilisers.
We found through our research in many rural farming communities, from India to Indonesia to West Africa, that the problems begin when the farmer does not have the cash they need to purchase supplies for their farm. Between payment from the previous cycle and the beginning of the next, earnings have been spent supporting family and community needs. Now, the farmer must rely on traditional banks, who are unlikely to be present in the community and unlikely to lend without proper documentation, or on local traders, who often charge exorbitant rates.
The farmer is then forced to go with the local trader. They elect to buy low-quality supplies in order to spend as little as possible to avoid more charges. The low-quality supplies yield a meager harvest and damage the soil, reducing the farmers' profit. In order to make ends meet, the farmer takes out another loan. They unknowingly enter a cycle of debt.
At Jiva, we aim to break this cycle by providing financing, in the form of digital “advances” to our farmers. Once a farmer signs up and is verified through Jiva’s app-based approval system, Jiva adds an advance amount to the farmer’s profile. The farmer can then only use that advance at Jiva’s e-commerce store, which stocks and delivers trusted, brand-name seeds and other supplies. The low- or no-cost advances allow the farmer to “buy now, pay later” without the exorbitant rates. At harvest, the Jiva Agent simply deducts the amount used for inputs from the total price of the harvest.
Our system of digital, non-fungible financing ensures that funds meant for the farm are used only for farm supplies, that those supplies are trusted, and that farmers avoid exorbitant rates that can quickly lead to financial hardship.
What’s next?
Jiva is constantly reviewing the designs, features, and delivery methods of our products. As we continue to extend advances to farmers across South Sulawesi, we remain committed to speaking directly with our users and Jiva Agents, improving our products and services, and creating value for millions of farmers around the world.
Interested in Jiva? Follow us on Linkedin and Twitter or reach out at hello@jiva.ag
Pak Saripuddin typically grows ~3 metric tonnes of corn on his 1 hectare field each cycle. After one season of following Jiva’s practical, feasible and personalized advice, he was able to grow 9.5 metric tonnes of corn.
To put that in perspective, that’s an entire year’s income earned in a single season!
Pak Saripuddin spoke with Jiva about his experience using the application, trying new practices, and adopting new behaviours. Like hundreds of farmers we’ve spoken with, Pak Saripuddin relied on agronomic advice from his peers. This is a common practice for many reasons, one of which is the lack of access to information about farming that is personalised to their crops maturity, easy to understand and feasible for smallholder farmers to adopt within their financial and labor limitations. Jiva’s advice, which focuses on micro-interventions throughout the season that lead to big improvements at harvest, were simple and doable. Though reluctant to change his common practices, including seed type, row spacing, and how to treat certain pests effectively, he’s ultimately glad he did.
Pak Saripuddin’s results are incredible, but they are not uncommon in underserved communities, where small changes can lead to enormous improvements. Imagine what would happen if the 500 million+ smallholder farmers around the world had access to Jiva’s advisory, financing and logistics services. Imagine how food systems, communities, and lives could change for the better.
Interested in Jiva? Follow us on Linkedin and Twitter or reach out at hello@jiva.ag
Last week, Jiva was featured in the Times of India.
He argues that to reinvent agricultural systems, we must borrow elements from popular consumer technologies. This strategy reduces the adoption hurdles for communities with low literacy and low technical fluency, as well as those who lack trust in technology. Ultimately he poses the question, why can’t Agtech become consumer tech?
Read on for a quote from the article:
“With simple, user-friendly technologies, we have the power to organise enormous tracts of data, package it and deliver it to users in a way that is dynamic, simple and highly personalised to their needs. As such, common consumer technologies are critical to the design and delivery of farmer-focused Agtech solutions. This is particularly true for those that underpin the apps we use everyday, such as advisory services, chat bots, AI-powered image recognition, digital loans and e-commerce stores. Platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp and Youtube are enormously popular among smallholder farmer populations. Why can’t AgTech borrow from these tools that farmers already know how to use? Why can’t AgTech become consumer tech?
Read the full piece here: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/voices/future-proofing-agricultural-systems-requires-user-centric-design-and-thoughtful-delivery/
To celebrate this milestone, here are some of our favourite images from the lives of our users — farmers and Jiva agents alike. They are our most important asset and we look forward to growing with them for years to come.
Interested in Jiva? Follow us on Linkedin and Twitter or reach out at hello@jiva.ag
But what makes a problem “wicked”?
By definition, a wicked problem is one that is difficult or impossible to solve due to its complex, ill-defined or contradictory elements. Often, “wicked” refers to a problem that does not have any singular solution.
These problems are caused and perpetuated by a dizzying web of interdependent forces. More often than not, these problems stack like nesting dolls, reinforcing one another and becoming more convoluted with time. In the case of rural agriculture, where economic and educational disparity collide with lack of access to technology, creating a working definition of the problem space can be a daunting task.
Seamus Tardif, Jiva’s Head of Growth, led several trips to Indonesia to give the team the opportunity to sit with community members — from farmers to traders to local officials — and speak about their experiences, successes and limitations within the current system. These trips ultimately defined our product strategy and the way we measure impact. Seamus explains, “What we’re battling is hundreds of years of a system that is stacked against these individuals. To make progress we must fundamentally change the way supply chains are structured, how value is distributed and how people acquire, accrue and apply knowledge. Ultimately, we are trying to change the odds in our farmer’s favor”.
To make progress we must fundamentally change the way supply chains are structured, how value is distributed and how people acquire, accrue and apply knowledge. Ultimately, we are trying to change the odds in our user’s favor
How does one begin to unwind generations of entrenched inequality and “change the odds”? Aria Nurfikry, Jiva’s Growth & Marketing Manager for Indonesia, believes that it all begins with trust. When discussing what surprised him about working with farmers, he noted, “the importance of the value of community in enhancing the credibility of our message. Trust is paramount in this market, and everything we do needs to drive towards building and reinforcing trust in Jiva within these communities”.
Building trust in a digital product, however, is not as easy as creating a simple and beautiful user experience or proclaiming a value proposition through a Facebook advertisement. For many who work and live in rural communities, inherent trust of, and comfort with, digital products do not yet exist.
Seamus explains, “we’re working with a population that has come online in the last 5 years. There is no such thing as a digital native. For hundreds if not thousands of years, these communities have operated without us. Our job now is to reframe technology as a tool for good; as something useful that can be relied on.” He continues, “Think about the developed world’s own adoption curve of technology. In the early 90s, very few of us understood its use cases. It usually took a friend or family member to demystify it”.
Jiva relies on a similar, community-first approach to build trust in our products. However, while many digital-first companies hope that organic referrals will lead to virality, we take a deliberate approach to employ key members of farming communities, whose deep relationships within local villages accelerate familiarity with, and adoption of, Jiva.
The familiarity that our on-ground team has with the lives of the farmers allow them to act as ambassadors of the service; they explain Jiva’s purpose, relate the use case to the individual farmer’s needs, and show farmers how to navigate the application. Instead of seeing a single, impersonal advertisement, farmers are likely to hear about Jiva from multiple known sources, building trust in the brand prior to adoption. Aria concludes,
“An omnichannel approach is critical because farmers need to know who we are; it’s easier to trust a friend who lives in your community than an application you’re seeing for the first time”.
Jiva’s growth team is therefore focused on designing, as Seamus describes it, “a softer approach to digital adoption”, through the deployment of on-ground community members who can ignite a self-perpetuating flywheel of trusted recommendations among disparate and hard-to-reach areas. Without this omnichannel approach, he notes, “it would take ten years to accomplish what we want to in two”.
At a fundamental level, this model seeks to minimize the amount of behavioral change required in adopting Jiva. By design, we ask an immense amount from our users: change your farming practices after decades in the field, buy your seeds online rather than at the local market, receive a digital loan, and do it all through a company you’ve just heard about. Employing friends and family of farmers as conduits of Jiva’s value and first-adopters of our products allows us to take a major element of this behavioral change — lack of face to face interaction — out of the equation. As Aria puts it, “our customer acquisition model allows us to be disruptive, but not prohibitively so”.
Ultimately, while Jiva is a startup that builds technology, our service will never be digital-only. Our relationships and actions within the community have an inherent physical component, and the experience of our farmers is heavily shaped by our employees on the ground. In fact, the majority of the user experience occurs between the farmer and these community employees, rather than between the farmer and the app screen.
Jiva’s engineers, designers, and product managers can build seamless and stunning digital experiences, but it’s the ability of Jiva’s on-ground network to truly embed the brand and its purpose within the community-conscious that drives customer acquisition, activation, and retention.
Wicked problems are complex and multifaceted. True progress against these problems requires a deep understanding of the lived experiences of the people that are subject to them — the big and the small, the universal truths and the personal nuances. Without that deep understanding, products, services and processes built for good may fail to reach critical adoption or address the true pain points felt by the user. In order to create lasting impact, we must meet our users in their communities, understand their pain points and treat them as partners in the evolution of our solutions. And all that begins with trust.
Seamus, when reflecting on Jiva’s community-driven growth model, concludes,
“A trust-first approach is not typical, but we aren’t trying to do something typical. When we crack the code and get millions of smallholder farmers to join us, we won’t be measuring impact in the number of users we have, but rather the step-change in power that their voice will have in the world”.
AgriCentral is a Jiva entity that offers a variety of advisory services for a variety of crops through their application, including:
The AgriCentral team created a video in honor of the milestone. Check it out here.
We are incredibly proud of AgriCentral’s success to date and look forward to all that is to come!
For more information on AgriCentral, visit their website or follow them on LinkedIn
Interested in Jiva? Follow us on Linkedin and Twitter or reach out at hello@jiva.ag
This result, after a single operating season, is unprecedented for a new entrant in a trust-based market where traditional relationships trump newcomers and human interactions are favoured over digital interfaces. We believe this achievement indicates that Jiva’s hybrid human-technology delivery model is working and that our users and agents find value in our products.
How does Jiva differ from traditional harvest buying?
Jiva differs from traditional methods of harvest purchase in several key ways. Read on to learn more:
Interested in Jiva? Follow us on Linkedin and Twitter or reach out at hello@jiva.ag
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