BCTA MEMBERSHIP STATUS
Active

SECTOR
Agriculture, Food & Beverage

HEADQUARTERS
India

REGION OF INITIATIVE
Asia & Pacific, Latin America & Caribbean

SDG CONTRIBUTION

RELATED NEWS

The Impact Goal

eKutir, as India’s first Certified B Corp, joined Business Call to Action in October 2019 with a commitment to improve the livelihoods of 2 million farmers by 2025, across Asia and Africa, assisting farmers in accessing knowledge, finance and markets through its farmer-centric, digital platform, Farmex.

The Market Gap

In the last decade, eKutir identified, for smallholder farmers, most of the constraints seeing access deprivation (to knowledge, markets, and services) as the core problem, and hypothesized that a holistic and comprehensive, technology-driven solution can address it effectively and efficiently. At the same time, observations suggested that digitally unskilled farmers cannot be engaged directly but would require a system that engages them in a trusting and participatory manner. With this in mind, eKutir developed a model in which it trained and equipped members of local agricultural communities, usually better educated and progressive members in a village/farming community, to use its digital platform, provide soil-testing and portfolio management to other farmers, and to help them procure the recommended inputs and aggregate produce.[1] Instead of employing them, they participate in eKutir’s model as “micro entrepreneurs”, either independently or attached to a farmer cooperative, incentivized for every activity undertaken on the digital platform.

The Business Solution

With a core objective to build a digital agri-fin ecosystem by enabling farmers and agri-fin stakeholders to cohesively work within a single, integrated platform, eKutir has built “Farmex”. Unlike other solutions, which are purely driven by "software", Farmex is driven by "farmer behaviour" by focusing on enabling "structures", strengthening "systems" and connecting "services", Farmex digitizes all these features to measure and monitor individual farm/farmer portfolios.

Farmex’s model, as developed by eKutir, is an entrepreneurship model where a digitally trained Agro Entrepreneur support groups of smallholder farmers in soil-testing, fertilizers, seeds and crop nutrient and pest management, best practices recommendations, inputs access and output market access. These Agro Entrepreneurs are selected, hired, and trained by eKutir to use Farmex to facilitate, manage, and monitor a variety of data and transactions. These Agro Entrepreneurs receive training in entrepreneurship, social business, soil testing, supply of seeds with proper cultivation, linking buyers to markets, and daily market price. An Agro Entrepreneur could be a progressive farmer embedded within eKutir’s channel partners – farmer collectives. The inherent social network between these progressive farmers and other farmer cooperative members helps Farmex to exponentially grow as each Agro Entrepreneur can effectively manage up to 200 farmers.

Farmex provides comprehensive, completely customized support for each farm throughout the growth cycle, making use of its proprietary, crop-agnostic smart farming technology. It combines data on individual farms with agronomical research, sustainable best practices, data on local availability of seeds and sustainable inputs, and on micro-climatic patterns. The platform delivers concise, actionable intelligence on a recurring basis. By combining and analyzing soil, crop, weather, environment and risk data around the smallest possible land sizes.

Furthermore, Farmex also identifies the carbon emissions and footprint of each farmer in the agriculture ecosystem through its FIX Carbon initiative. Using this, Farmex can measure and incentivise farmers in real time through carbon trading and crediting.

About eKutir:  Since its inception in 2009, eKutir’s goal has been to extend novel, technology-driven opportunities to people at the “bottom of the pyramid,” and to enable impoverished communities to develop sustainably. eKutir has created a first of its kind smart farming platform for smallholders, and developed operational models that enabled the technology to benefit rural communities, illiterate and digitally inept farmers. With the launch of its flagship brand, Farmex, eKutir is on a mission to democratise the future of farming. eKutir is currently active in India, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and Philippines.

[1] Jha, S.K., Pinsonneault, A. and Dubé, L. "The evolution of an ICT Platform-Enabled Ecosystem for Poverty Alleviation: The Case of eKutir." MISQ, 40 no. 2 (2016): 431-445.