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The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab’s (J-PAL) has showcased PxD as an organization that leveraged the value of randomized evaluations to launch more effective approaches to reducing poverty on a global scale.

The video was produced as part of J-PAL’s “Evidence to Policy” series which was envisaged as a vehicle to highlight the use of rigorous testing to inform policy and scale effective change.  

The producers interviewed Shawn Cole, PxD co-founder, Chair of our Board and a J-PAL affiliated professor, Tomoko Harigaya, Chief Economist, and Niriksha Shetty, India Country Director, discuss how evidence from rigorous evaluations catalyzed the scale-up of a low-cost, mobile phone-based agricultural information delivery system to support smallholder farmers. 

We thank J-PAL for this rather excellent production!

**UPDATE** On December 15, 2021, the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture canceled the project that had been awarded to PxD by public tender. We continue to work with our regional partners, IICA, and the Government of Brazil to identify complementarities and further opportunities for collaboration. 

Claudia Carbajal Morelos, PxD’s Regional Manager for Latin America, lays out the contours of the project.

We are humbled and thrilled to have been announced as the winners of a tendering process to deliver digital extension services to 100,000 farmers in Brazil’s Northeast Region (NER). The announcement by Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Food Supply (MAPA) on the 6th of July marked the conclusion of a rigorous and competitive five-month-long tendering process. 

This was PxD’s first experience navigating a government tender process and will be our first project in Brazil!

Serving 100, 000 farmer users!

Our ambition is to send the first message by mid-January 2022. We will serve 30,000 farmer users in the first year, rising to 100,000 in the second. Our digital extension service will include advisory information on both livestock and crops.

Northeast Region (NER)

Brazil’s NER represents 18 percent of Brazil’s territory and is comprised of nine states: Maranhão, Piauí, Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte, Paraíba, Pernambuco, Alagoas, Sergipe and Bahia. Livestock husbandry is an important component of farming activity – the region is home to over 90 percent of the national goat herd, over 60 percent of Brazil’s sheep herd, and 13 percent of the country’s cattle and swine herds, respectively.

The region was home to 53.6 million people in the 2012 census. While this figure is equivalent to 28 percent of the national population, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), assessed the NER as the poorest region in the country and home to nearly half (47.9%) of Brazil’s population living under the poverty line (2018). The share of poverty is substantially lower in the Central-West and South regions, which account for 5.7 and 2.5 percent of Brazil’s population living in poverty.

While national poverty rates decreased in 2020 – primarily a result of public emergency aid and cash transfer programs extended in response to the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic – the number of people living in poverty is expected to rise dramatically in 2021 following the scaling back of temporary assistance measures, poor labor market recovery, and a resurgent COVID-19 case count.

Widespread poverty in NER is complicated by frequent droughts that disproportionately impact rural and farming livelihoods. 

Timeline

The project will run for 22 months. I am excited to activate our in-country team and we are already moving! We have already commenced the scoping component of the project to map the sector and improve our understanding of the region and its challenges. 

Partnerships

The project will be implemented in partnership with the Government of Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Food Supply (MAPA) and our regional partners, the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA). The project is being implemented as a Build Operate and Transfer initiative, whereby, at the end of the project’s implementation horizon, we will transfer management and operational responsibilities to our partners at MAPA.

Information poverty – when people do not have access to information about knowledge and technology to inform productive decisions – is a key driver of material poverty, and a significant challenge impeding poor people as they attempt to improve their lives.

Precision Agriculture for Development’s (PAD) work, at its core, was to scale cost-effective digital information provision via services that empower poor people with knowledge to improve their lives. We know that it is possible to provide targeted, customized, and actionable information very cheaply and directly to poor households. Our work demonstrates that our model is extremely cost-effective and that it is a scalable way of bringing benefits to the world’s poorest people. But we also know that smallholder farmers need more than agricultural information and that poor people beyond the remit of smallholder agriculture stand to benefit from our services. 

As we have grown and demonstrated our impact and cost-effectiveness, we have fielded inquiries and pursued lines of inquiry that – were we to fulfill them – would stretch the credulity of a “digital agriculture service”. As the experience of piloting and operationalizing our ElimuLeo service bears out, our expertise, capabilities, and services are demonstrably transferable to an educational context. We believe there are other sectors in which we can add value too.

An additional challenge we as an organization have grappled with is that “Precision Agriculture for Development” does not accurately describe the work we do. In fact – as followers of precision agriculture will know – the name of our organization has implied that we do work which we do not do; and suggest sectoral guardrails that can inhibit our potential to expand and diversify our operations, partnerships, funding base, and potentially our human resource base.  

Introducing Precision Development (PxD):

In light of these and other considerations, in August 2020, PAD’s Board authorised PAD to consider opportunities to provide information services in education and other sectors, in addition to agriculture. In September we formally changed our legally registered name to Precision Development (PxD) to accommodate a wider range of possible activities. Agriculture will remain our primary focus and smallholder farmers and their families will continue to constitute the vast majority of our users.

We are excited to present to you our new logo and branding assets. We hope you will join us as we consider new opportunities and partnerships, within and beyond agriculture, to advance information provision to poor families in developing countries. From a practical perspective, our acronym “PxD” will help to set us beyond the ranks of the many “PDs” crowding the acronym marketplace. We also hope that the “x” will invite conversation about what we do, our secret sauce, and the possibilities implicit in our services, experience, and capabilities.

As PxD iterates, learns and grows, we will remain committed to a few core principles:  

If you would like any additional information about PxD or would like to explore a new collaboration, please do not hesitate to contact us.

X marks the spot!