Lean data: Big benefits for smallholder supply chains

Our Smallholdr customised mobile app and web-based dashboards empower our clients to better manage their smallholder supply chains and deliver ‘lean data’. Lean data, a concept developed by Acumen, puts the voice of the customer at the heart of impact measurement; it is the collection of high quality impact data to demonstrate social change with efficient use of resources. For further information see “SSIR The power of Lean Data“.

Continuous information throughout the year

When our Smallholdr system is deployed, a stream of detailed geo-tagged data is generated on what field officers and farmers are doing – on a day to day and week by week basis. Not only does this provide vital operational information, but it means that when a company wishes to report on their supply chain performance – either for compliance, to meet the monitoring needs of a donor or investor, or to support ESG reporting – then all (or most) of the data will already be available. It will also be higher quality and more accurate than any ‘snapshot’ survey or audit.

To illustrate how efficient the data collection can be, and how it can serve multiple purposes, the table below shows a series of typical Smallholdr surveys for an agribusiness that buys crops from small farmers. These surveys are either deployed seasonally, where they relate to specific parts of the crop growing cycle, or they could be deployed at any convenient time to capture more general information about the farmer and his or her livelihood. Every time a field officer meets with a farmer more data can be captured and stored against the farmers record in the Smallholdr database. Any set of questions can be asked, as our system is completely customisable – so we can incorporate any certification questions you need into our mobile app surveys, eliminating the need for costly enumeration or auditing.

Multiple uses of information captured by Smallholdr

The examples in this table are by no means exhaustive – there are an abundance of ways we can help our clients to harness and use data. All manner of relevant factors could be monitored, from soil nutrition to rainfall, flowering times to animal health… whatever you need to plan and manage your agribusiness better. Not only that, but we can tailor the system to automatically generate the summarised data or records that you need.

Less time wasted asking and answering the same old questions!

This “real time” data management approach is much better for the farmers too, replacing time-consuming, lengthy annual surveys, answering the same questions (name, phone number, location, etc) each time. With Smallholdr, only new information is requested, and it is seamlessly added to a farmer’s database record. Rather than long tedious surveys, the farmer can just provide short updates throughout the year. Furthermore, each farmer’s key farming information can be made available on the app to a field officer, so each time he or she engages with the farmer, all relevant information is at hand to help them provide tailored advice.

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Get in touch

If you would like more information on how Smallholdr can help you work with small farmers or beekeepers, run your outgrower programme efficiently AND provide you with rich, accurate and lean data that demonstrates that your operation is an inclusive business or meets certification standards, please get in touch!

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