Unlocking Massive User Reach in 2024

One year ago, we celebrated the exciting milestone of Precision Development (PxD) reaching over 10 million users in 2023. 

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that in 2024, we’ve nearly doubled our user reach, soaring to 18.5 million users in the past 12 months!

This includes direct service delivery to farmers through the digital platforms PxD has developed, as well as enhanced digital agriculture services we’ve helped improve in partnership with others.

Founded in 2016 with the bold vision of improving the lives of 100 million people, PxD reached its first 10 million users over the course of seven years (2016-2023). But in 2024, we’ve added nearly as many new users in just one year! This incredible surge in user reach is driven by a few key pathways:

First, in 2024, we launched a new partnership with the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare (MoA&FW) in India and the University of Chicago Development Innovation Lab (DIL) to disseminate weather forecasts to farmers in India. Climate change is already making weather patterns more unpredictable across the world and adding to farmers’ production risks, and yet most smallholder farmers lack access to reliable weather information. There is a large body of evidence showing that farmers change their behavior in response to weather forecasts (Fosu et al. 2018; Viviano and Rudder, 2024; Burlig et al. 2024) and that access to these forecasts improves farmers’ profits (Yegbemey et al. 2023; Camacho and Conover 2019). Based on this evidence, in 2024 PxD, DIL, MoA&FW, and IMD successfully launched a large-scale pilot disseminating seasonal weather forecasts to more than 9 million farmers in India across five states – Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Telangana, and Chhattisgarh. The pilot provided farmers with two types of seasonal forecasts – a forecast of the dates of the beginning of the monsoon season and a forecast of the cumulative rainfall expected over the monsoon season. Forecasts were delivered to farmers via the MoA&FW’s existing mKisan SMS platform. In a recent press release during COP 29, the MoA&FW has committed to expand the program to digitally deliver weather forecasts to tens of millions of farmers across India. A blog post on this work will follow soon!

Second, in 2024, we concluded the five-year Digital Agricultural Advisory Services (DAAS) project in Ethiopia, in partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA), Agricultural Transformation Institute (ATI), and Digital Green, and with the support of the Gates Foundation (GF) and the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). Through this project, PxD scaled voice-based digital agricultural advice to nearly 2 million crop and livestock farmers over the last five years, including 1.2 million farmers in Ethiopia in 2024 – a dramatic increase from roughly 650,000 farmers in 2023. These farmers were reached through a combination of ATI’s inbound 8028 Farmers’ Hotline, which PxD improved through a series of A/B tests and new content development, as well as outbound voice calls delivered via 8028 and PxD’s PADDY platform, targeting specific use cases for dairy farmers. 

Lastly, PxD continues to employ a Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) model wherever possible to build locally embedded digital agriculture services and then to transition these services to government partners for sustainable long-term service delivery. Through this BOT model, millions of farmers continue to improve their lives through services that PxD built and which now operate without PxD’s direct involvement. The best example of this model is Ama Krushi – PxD’s flagship digital agriculture service in Odisha, India – which PxD built in partnership with the Odisha state Department of Agriculture and Farmers’ Empowerment (DAFE), and transitioned to the Odisha state government in 2022. This service has continued to scale after the transition, growing from 3 million farmers at the time of transition in 2022 to more than 7 million farmers in Odisha in 2024. Evidence from a randomized evaluation of PxD’s flagship service in Odisha shows that providing digital advice to farmers increases their agricultural production, reduces the likelihood of crop loss, and improves their profits by roughly $26-39 per agricultural season in areas of excess rainfall. We estimate that for every $1 invested in PxD’s services, we generate additional agricultural profits of $9-15. This evidence is highlighted in a recent article in Devex authored by PxD chief economist and director of research Tomoko Harigaya and co-founder and board director Shawn Cole, and in a recently published working paper (Cole et al., 2025). 

2024 also saw the launch of a new PxD service model – advising governments on how to optimize and manage their nationwide portfolios of digital agriculture services. In addition to the 18.5 million users that we reached through direct service delivery and improving other partners’ services, in 2024, we also supported at least 5 million additional users indirectly through this government advisory service model. In December 2023, we launched a Project Management Unit (PMU) embedded within the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare (MoA&FW) to help the Government of India prioritize digital agriculture services, monitor service quality, and expand services across additional states. The most significant impact of this work to date has been through India’s E-Mitra platform, an AI-based chatbot which provides farmers with information on select government agricultural schemes, and in 2024 reached more than 5 million farmers with improved services through PxD’s support. In 2025, we plan to expand this government advisory model to at least one additional geography by launching a similar PMU embedded within the Ethiopian MoA to implement the country’s Digital Agriculture Roadmap, which was developed in 2024.

PxD is excited to continue collaborating with our valued partners to build on this momentum and drive even greater impact at scale in 2025 and beyond!