Enabling essential service delivery across the digital divide
Climate Edge facilitates the delivery of information services to agricultural communities at scale, translating complex services into SMS format for smallholder farmers across the digital divide.
Access to advisory services is vital for agriculture, significantly impacting farm income. Farmers rely on weather forecasts, pest alerts, irrigation schedules, and more.
However, such services are often inaccessible in rural developing regions due to low smartphone ownership, limited internet access, and digital literacy. In fact, over 90% of sub-Saharan smallholder farmers lack access to any value-adding agricultural services.
Climate Edge collaborates with research institutes, private sectors, NGOs, and farming cooperatives to translate intricate models and data into SMS-based content, reaching tens of thousands of dispersed smallholder farmers effectively.
Some of the organisations Climate Edge works with:
From Digital to SMS
SMS is not inherently a scalable messaging solution, conventionally it only allows for one-to-one communication. There are digital tools that allows scaling sms to a one-to-many tool, but these are generic and not tailored for specific service delivery, let alone in agriculture.
The Climate Edge SaaS platform allows organisations to scale automated two-way SMS communication to thousands of farmers, setting up custom services, surveys, data collection, notifications, and much more.
Service Examples
Location specific Weather services
To provide useful weather information, knowing the recipients location is essential, but how do you get the location without a gps enabled smartphone? To solve this, we tapped into a database that mapped all of Kenyas 1450 local districts and asked the weather service subscribers which ward they were in. This allowed us to link a location to the number and send them relevant weather data.
Providing COVID related updates to farmers
A large coffee cooperative in Kenya needed to inform their farmers with the latest measures they were taking with regards to the COVID pandemic. Travel was restricted and information needed to be shared often to keep everyone updated. The cooperative used the Climate Edge bulk SMS feature to update their members about how to stay safe during the pandemic and how to access personal protective equipment.
Data collection for better cooperative services
A large coffee cooperative in Kenya was missing essential data, such as phone numbers, for a large number of their members. To collect this data in person would have been difficult and taken a lot of time. Climate Edge assigned the cooperative a custom short code (#XXX) and established different ways to encourage members to sign up to this short code (e.g. at farmer training, membership events, harvest locations, etc.). A short questionnaire enabled linking a name to the phone number and over a short amount of time, the cooperative was able to collect data from a substantial number of their farmers.
User research to increase service subscriber numbers
Relevance and trust in content & origin increases the engagement of Kenyan smallholder farmers with agricultural services delivered via SMS.
Context
Because of the limited available and access to the internet, SMS is a widely used communication solution in Kenya, often also used for marketing or, unfortunately, fraud. Many people are aware and concerned about this and often don't trust, respond, or even just read messages from unknown senders. This posed a serious problem to Climate Edge services and impacted our subscriber numbers significantly. So I planned and ran an elaborate research project to explore why an SMS based invitation to a relevant agricultural SMS service experiences low response rates from Kenyan smallholder farmers.
Research Summary
Generative user research was conducted in form of phone interviews with a total of 32 farmers with questions to learn about user motivations and two practical experiments related to SMS delivery methods conducted by Climate Edge on an SMS delivery platform. It outlines the motivations, tasks and environmental constraints of the intended users in order to suggest opportunities on how to improve the usability and relevance of the services on offer, and therefore increase subscriber numbers.
Project Details
As a co-founder at Climate Edge, I was involved in business strategy, client communication, project management, representing Climate Edge at events internationally, and more. As designer at Climate Edge, I was responsible for anything user facing, including outreach and service delivery strategy, user research and testing, service design, digital product design, UI/UX, marketing material,