The ClimateBoot Camp       

All of our organizations must convert to sustainable practices.  We, as members of those organizations must speak up and act!  The EcoActUs Climate Boot Camp provides the training and tools you need to act.

The Boot Camp offers a self-directed, college level course for activists, policy makers and teachers - designed as a memory palace to allow adult learners to quickly get an overview of climate solutions and then easily drill down on the detail they need.  The student can focus on what’s important to them, learn how to effectively be a change maker and find the detailed information they needed to support the changes they want to make.  It is presented in a virtual interactive workshop that leads individuals and organizations through the process of creating and implementing an effective sustainability and regeneration strategy.  It is available free globally for local showings and is easily customized for your purposes.

This workshop was developed jointly by the Climate Reality Project and the Harvard Alumni for the Climate and Environment.

Fifty-five expert climate leaders explain what needs to be done about the Climate Crisis and how to get it done – in a series of 8-to-15-minute presentations.  This self-guided workshop allows the trainee to select the relevant materials and leads the trainee singularly, or with their team, through a step-by-step process to developing their personal or organization’s; action plan..

The workshop includes 7.5-hours of overview lectures plus 9 optional hours on  emerging technology solutions.  It features global experts from Climate Reality, Harvard, Yale, SMU, Bioneers, Project Drawdown, Kiss the Ground, the Biomimicry Institute, government and many other leading organizations. These lectures are supported by over 400 expertly curated links to sites that provide the student with the detailed, accurate knowledge on the technologies and skills needed to build a sustainability plan and to create the support to get it implemented.  Each student receives this free eworkbook with links to lectures, web sites, pod casts, music, art and film.  

Individuals and organizations can schedule their own small group discussions and work sessions to complete the planning exercises.

For information on how and when individuals and organizations can take the workshop free of charge see www.ecoactus.org .

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In the rapidly evolving landscape of Indian agriculture, a fascinating experiment is underway that could fundamentally transform how farmers interact with agricultural services and re-imagine agricultural markets that work for the weakest link in the value chain. Unified Agriculture Interface (UAI) is an ambitious experiment to create an open, interoperable network that puts farmers at the centre of the agricultural ecosystem.

A Historical Perspective on Agricultural Networks

The concept of decentralized, peer-to-peer agricultural networks isn't new to India. Historical records collected through a survey of about 2000 villages of the Chengalpattu district during the 1760s and 1770s.the 1770s show how village-level institutions in Tamil Nadu had sophisticated systems for sharing agricultural produce with different stakeholders.

Image Credits: From Dharampal Lectures - Land Use and Taxation in 18th century Chengalpattu Village

This decentralized, village-led approach to resource distribution shows a glimmer of possibility for modern efforts to create digital agricultural networks that are locally managed yet globally connected.

Understanding the UAI Vision

At its core, UAI aims to solve a fundamental challenge in modern agriculture: the fragmentation of agricultural services across multiple platforms and applications. Currently, farmers must navigate numerous apps for different services – from advisory services to marketplace platforms – creating inefficiencies and barriers to access. UAI proposes to break down these silos by creating an interoperable network that allows seamless movement between different agricultural services and platforms.

Key Features and Architecture

The UAI architecture is built on three fundamental elements

• Identity: Representing farmers, land parcels, equipment, and digital infrastructure

• Credentialing: Verification and authentication of various players in the network

• Open Network: A system enabling seamless interactions between different platforms and services

The network is being developed using the Beckn protocol, which provides a standardized language for different platforms to communicate and interact. This ensures that various agricultural services can work together seamlessly while maintaining their individual autonomy.

The Nashik Pilot Project

UAI's practical implementation is beginning with a pilot project in Nashik, Maharashtra. This region was chosen for its mature agricultural ecosystem and openness to technological innovation. The pilot focuses on three initial use cases:

1. Agricultural advisory services

2. Equipment and machinery rentals

3. Aggregation centers, including pack houses and cold storage facilities

The pilot aims to demonstrate how local agricultural communities can benefit from an integrated network of services while maintaining local control and ownership.

Benefits for Stakeholders

For Farmers:

• Single point of access to multiple agricultural services

• Broader choice of service providers

• Ability to rate and review service providers

• Seamless access to both local and national markets

For Service Providers:

• Reduced customer acquisition costs

• Access to a wider farmer base

• Improved service delivery efficiency

• Integration with complementary services

Integration with Existing Networks

UAI is designed to work in conjunction with other agricultural networks and initiatives:

• It can serve as a hyperlocal arm of the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC)

• It integrates with Vistaar for advisory and information services

• It can connect with various government schemes and services

This interconnected approach ensures that local networks can tap into national resources while maintaining their autonomy.

Addressing Key Concerns

During a recent webinar on Unified Agriculture Interface,several important questions were raised:

Data Privacy and Ownership:

• Service providers maintain control over their proprietary data

• The network facilitates data sharing based on agreed-upon terms

• Participants can decide the extent of their integration with the network

Network Management:

• The network will be managed by a coalition of participating partners

• Governance structures will evolve based on pilot learnings

• The focus is on community-led decision making

Standardization:

• The Beckn protocol provides standardized APIs for integration

• Service providers can implement these specifications while maintaining their unique offerings

• The protocol allows for evolution based on user needs

Looking Ahead

The UAI pilot in Nashik is scheduled to go live by December 15, with the initial focus on the three primary use cases. The success of this pilot could pave the way for similar implementations across other agricultural regions in India. The ultimate vision is to create a network of networks that enables farmers to seamlessly access services, markets, and information while maintaining local control and ownership.

As India continues to lead in developing digital public infrastructure, UAI represents a significant step toward creating more efficient, farmer-centric agricultural systems.

Author: Venky Ramachandran is the Mission Director of UAI. He works as an independent agritech consultant, analyst and researcher at Agribusiness Matters

Healthy, sustainable, and inclusive food systems are essential for achieving global development goals. Agriculture stands as a cornerstone of global development, playing a crucial role in ending poverty, boosting prosperity, and ensuring food security for a growing world population. As we face the challenge of feeding a projected 10 billion people by 2050, the transformation of our food systems becomes increasingly urgent. 

Agriculture drives economic growth

Agricultural development is one of the most powerful tools to combat extreme poverty and foster shared prosperity. It plays a vital role in economic growth, accounting for approximately 4% of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Furthermore, agriculture provides employment for around 27% of the global workforce and is crucial for food security, particularly in developing regions. Notably, growth in the agriculture sector is two to four times more effective in raising incomes among the poorest populations compared to other sectors. (World Bank, 2024)

Despite its importance, agriculture faces several pressing challenges:

1. Climate Change: Extreme weather events and shifting growing seasons destabilize agricultural systems.

2. Soil Degradation: Intensive farming practices reduce productivity and increase vulnerability to environmental shocks.

3. Water Scarcity: Over-extraction and pollution threaten agricultural productivity, especially in arid regions.

4. Biodiversity Loss: Monoculture and chemical inputs compromise the resilience of agricultural ecosystems.

5. Limited Access: Smallholder farmers often lack access to modern technologies, financial services, and markets.

The Promise of Digital Transformation: High-Trust at Low-Cost

To address these challenges, countries and organizations are turning to cutting-edge technology with the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) approach, to drive inclusive growth, empower citizens, and enable society to leap forward.

When seen from a DPI lens, the digital economy is built on three key pillars: Identity, Assets, and Transactions—essentially answering the questions: Who am I? What do I have? What do I do with it?

In agriculture, the digital identity, tokenized assets, and open-transaction networks could manifest as - digital, verifiable, and tokenized—Farmer registries, Land registries, Land ownership records, Soil health cards, Crop sown certificates, Organic agriculture certifications, Open-network Marketplaces.. and so on.

Through registries, credentials, and tokenization, we can revolutionize the agriculture industry by introducing digital verifiability, fractional ownership, and liquidity of assets. This enables faster and more efficient trade of farm produce, the creation of high-trust marketplaces, and greater transparency and traceability throughout the supply chain. By leveraging these, we can reduce fraud and counterfeiting, empower smallholder farmers with access to financial services, and promote sustainable agricultural practices. Ultimately, these innovations can improve food security, enhance economic opportunities, and create a more resilient and equitable food system.

The Power of Digital Registries and Verifiable Credentials

Traditional paper-based systems are costly and inefficient, often involving high costs and low trust. The expenses associated with issuing and delivering paper certificates, losing originals, requesting duplicates, and conducting background checks can be overwhelming for individuals and organizations alike.

Transitioning to digital registries and verifiable credentials can:

• Empower Farmers: Improve access to credit, insurance, government schemes, disaster recovery plans, and market participation.

• Streamline Subsidies and Aid: Safeguard against supply chain disruptions, unexpected climate changes, and ensure fair market practices.

• Enhance Observability: Provide credible data to inform policy reforms, reward sustainable farming practices, and monitor soil health at scale.

Building Trust Through Registries and Credentials

Digital registries and Verifiable credentials can establish high-trust at low-cost by:

1. Reducing costs through trusted sources of information

2. Preventing repetitive data collection

3. Enabling instant verification of farmers’ identities, land ownership, and assets

4. Empowering farmers with multimodal document sharing

5. Creating an interoperable and decentralized source of truth

6. Improving accessibility and inclusion of services

7. Fostering innovation and collaboration within the ecosystem

As an example, the AgriStack initiative in India, is implementing a comprehensive digital framework that includes farmer and farmland registries, crop registries, and a unified farmer service interface. This initiative aims to connect government departments, private enterprises, and social organizations through a robust digital infrastructure. This digital infrastructure aims to unite government departments, private enterprises, and social organizations. Additionally, open-source digital public goods like Sunbird RC, Inji, and CORD are available for anyone to adopt in their solutions.

Let’s Imagine a Sustainable Future

A Farmer's Journey: From Seed to Market

Meet Amina, a smallholder farmer. She cultivates a few acres of land, growing maize and cassava.Traditional methods and limited access to markets have constrained her income and ability to expand her farm.

Seed Registry and Verifiable Credentials: Amina purchases certified maize seeds from a local cooperative. The seeds are registered in a blockchain-based registry, ensuring their quality and provenance. Amina receives a verifiable credential that confirms the seed's authenticity. This protects her investment and increases her chances of a successful harvest.

Asset Tokenization: As her crops mature, Amina tokenizes a portion of her maize harvest. These tokens represent ownership of the maize and can be traded on a decentralized marketplace. This allows her to access a global market and potentially sell her harvest at a higher price than she could through traditional channels.

Traceability and Sustainability: The registry and tokenization system also ensures the traceability of Amina's maize. Consumers can verify where the maize was grown, the farming practices used, and whether it meets sustainability standards. This can increase demand for Amina's produce and premium prices.

Financial Inclusion: By tokenizing her assets, Amina can access financial services, such as loans and insurance, that were previously unavailable to her. These services can help her invest in improvements to her farm, expand her operations, and weather unexpected challenges.

Let’s co-create a DPI Stack for Open Agri Net

The DPI approach for trust, tokenization & data sharing, when combined with open-networks and artificial intelligence, has the potential to unlock vast opportunities. Together, we can work towards ending world hunger, creating sustainable food production systems, reducing inequalities, safeguarding against supply chain disruptions, and a thriving economy.

Let us envision a future where minimalist digital public infrastructure empowers individuals, facilitates consent-driven data sharing, lowers service costs, and expands inclusive access to opportunities. By infusing high-trust and transact-ability into our economies through registries, credentialized records, and tokenized assets that are reusable across sectors, we can transform the agricultural landscape for the better.

Together, we can build a more sustainable, inclusive, and prosperous future for agriculture and the world!

SurendraSingh Sucharia

Vice President - Product & Technology, Dhiway

Product Lead - Sunbird RC

Note: Help of technology, such as Generative AI, Search, and Internet, was taken for research, paraphrasing and reframing parts of this article/document.

Transforming Agriculture with DPI - The “Why” 

Agriculture is key to the African economy and is a primary source of livelihood for most of the populations. To leverage the advancements made by DPI in recent years and to create an inclusive and innovative digital knowledge economy towards climate-resilient Agriculture, it is imperative to empower farmers with necessary tools and knowledge, along with necessary opportunities for market linkages and credit sources. This necessitates the need for a “Global DPI-based Digital Agri-transformation effort”; by enabling open & decentralised agro-networks that are underpinned by a universal suite of open protocols & data standards. Smallholder farmers produce a large part of Africa’s food supply. However, they face multiple challenges at production and marketing levels, hindering their productivity and livelihoods, including limited access to markets, agricultural inputs, credit, and technologies. Uneven access to agricultural extension services significantly hinders smallholder farmers' ability to address these challenges. 

Building on the foundation of robust people-networks that exist today - The Kuza Youth Agripreneur Model

In response to this, an Agri-tech social enterprise Kuza Biashara - a smallholder farmer ecosystem management platform that leverages the last mile entrepreneurial agents to increase the income of smallholder farmers at scale, in Africa & Asia - has been at the forefront of providing innovative solutions for off-grid farmers through micro-learning, micro-distribution, and micro-mentorship. Through its Rural Entrepreneur Development Incubators program (REDI), Kuza trains young people from rural communities to become agripreneurs. Agripreneurs join Kuza’s OneNetwork, a digital marketplace, to connect with service providers and offer bundled services to smallholder farmers (e.g access to high-quality input, crop advisory, credit, and market linkages). Each agripreneur supports 200 smallholder farmers to help them boost their productivity and incomes. By actively assimilating farmer-voices through this model, Kuza has curated a massive library of content spanning across;

• bitesized HD video-based skilling content on entrepreneurship, soft & life skills in local languages 

• good agricultural practices & climate smart technologies, regenerative agriculture practices for 40+ food crops, horticulture crops and livestock.

Kuza OneNetwork: A Connected Ecosystem for AgricultureBuilding upon the successful Kuza agripreneur model & OneNetwork, a vision for a DPI-effort in Kenya is being put forth on the table with critical sectoral stakeholders involved - incl. Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development, KALRO, ASNET, among others - that aims to establish an open and federated transaction network (an expanded version of the Kuza OneNetwork). The OneNetwork is  envisioned to create a seamless, interconnected ecosystem - bringing together farmers, agripreneurs, traders, suppliers, financial institutions, government bodies, and consumers. Kuza is spearheading the design & deployment of the OneNetwork across Kenya, with a Beckn protocol (a global DPG for transaction interoperability) powered approach; wherein it is proposed that the Agripreneur workforce will leverage a Kuza seeker platform to connect to & transact with a host of provider side platforms in the OneNetwork ecosystem, to fulfil several use cases in Agri-advisory, Agri-credit services, Agri-marketplace services, and furthermore (*a proposed vision is illustrated below) via this OneNetwork.

This model is centred around an ambition to accomplish the following policy goals:

1. Enhanced market linkages to Agro-service providers to Local farmers

2. Seamless discovery and access of farming inputs, credit services and equipment with price transparency

3. Expanding interest among Kenyan youth to uncover rural entrepreneurship opportunities  - via the “Agripreneur” model and DPI-tools like verifiable credentials (for skills & job-related efforts) and a Digital wallet. 

4. Strong data observability to aid a Government’s policy-driven farming practices and enabling Government, Academia and Civil society contributions to sustained innovations in the sector.

Scaling up Kuza OneNetwork adoption Globally

Kuza’s current adoption trajectory is shaping up as follows;

• The Kenya OneNetwork will be scaled up pan-country in ‘24-’25. 

• This OneNetwork playbook for Agriculture will be explored for; 

• expansion across the EAC region, in ‘25-26, with potentially a connected regional-marketplace in the offing.

• Kuza plans are underway in more territories - Zambia, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Nepal, Colombia, Brazil among others - with a DPI/Beckn enabled open transaction network model being a core pillar in the proposed Agri-DPI modernization strategies for those countries. 

Kuza’s experience in Kenya, and other deployments in Africa & Asia - represents a unique worldwide opportunity to firmly establish & accelerate the DPI and Open Networks - in Digital Agriculture missions across the globe.