Times of India: Future-proofing Agricultural Systems Requires User-Centric Design and Thoughtful Delivery

September 2021

Last week, Jiva was featured in the Times of India.

In the piece, Jiva CPO Aakash Dharmadhikari outlines the challenges that smallholder farmers face around the world and highlights our reliance on this critical population for our own food security. 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/