IDEO.org Fellow Danny Alexander and his IDEO.org team identified several opportunity areas for our Innovation Fund client to pursue that focus on how farmers consume information about new farming practices.

In the beginning of our two-week project, Juhudi Kilimo approached us with this question: How might we provide technical information to farmers to help then maximize their investments in a way that is both scalable and efficient?

When we first sought to understand this design challenge, we asked farmers about their experience with agricultural trainings, but quickly realized that the term “training” for the average Kenyan farmer typically refers to large, infrequent, lecture-style events with too many participants to make answering questions possible. As a result, we shifted our focus from "training" to "learning", and discovered that formal trainings were only one of many different ways that farmers learned new information about farming best practices. In fact, farmers have access to a number of other sources of information, from weekly radio programs to informal exchanges between neighbors. Farmers often piece together bits of information from a variety of sources, but one consistent theme emerged in our research: most farmers don't have accessible, affordable fora for asking questions.

In our final presentation (which you can read HERE), we highlighted this and many other observations about how farmers consume information. Based on these observations we've also identified a few initial opportunity areas for further investigation. Because the project was relatively brief (just two weeks), these opportunity areas are still quite rough. Helping farmers learn is integral for ensuring that Juhudi Kilimo's social mission is fulfilled, and we hope that the new opportunities to improve farmer learning that our IDEO.org team identified will help Juhudi Kilimo's borrowers (aka, farmers) make investments and maximize returns for the good of both Juhudi Kilimo and the farmers it supports.