small-group case study exercise

EXERCISE One copy to be provided to each in-­‐person participant and shared with remote participants OBJECTIVE Lay out a plan for implementation of a seed fair management system that illustrates the “design with the user” principle. BACKGROUND The field project manager for an agriculture project in the Central African Republic (CAR) intends to conduct a series of 23 seed fairs over a six month period reaching 10,000 households. Voucher-­‐
based seed fairs are a well-­‐known approach for distributing planting materials to poor and vulnerable people. The project manager believes that she can create efficiencies in the management of these fairs through the use of technology to register participants and track their use of vouchers. The fairs will begin in three months. ROLE PLAY Facilitators play the role of one or more users. The following material provides guidance for tht role. ELICIT QUESTIONS What questions do you have? Please indicate who you are asking and what you want to know. RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS ABOUT ENVIRONMENT In CAR, these fairs are held in rural areas with no network access and no access to power. They are conducted by French-­‐speaking field agents with a high-­‐school education. Some agents have used mobile devices, some have not, but all are willing to do so, while their supervisors are used to using desktops in the their offices with intermittent internet connectivity and low-­‐end mobile phones. Seed vendors typically are literate in French. Many of the household members participating in the fairs are illiterate. However, they are comfortable answering field agent questions, they are used to signing receipts by marking an “x “ when asked, and they have no objections to their pictures being taken. RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS ABOUT VOLUMES The average seed fair includes 400 beneficiaries, 20 vendors and are manned by 5 field agents and take 6 hours to complete. RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS ABOUT PROJECT GOALS The project manager believes that technology may help her to achieve one or more of the following results: •
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Reduction in the labor required to run a seed fair by reducing the time and therefore the number of people required to check-­‐in and check-­‐out household members and vendors during the fair. Reduction in the time between the end of the fair and the submission of reports to the donor. Improvement in the quality of data reported. Typical issues in conducting seed fairs in the past include loss of paper records, records damaged during transport, field agent recording errors, and data transcription errors. Reduction in fraud. Typical issues during the seed fairs in the past include unqualified individuals taking the place of qualifying household members, household members entering multiple queues and receiving more than their fair share of vouchers, and vendors short changing fair participants when distributing planting materials. RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS ABOUT CURRENT PROCESSES Today, seed fairs are managed as follows: •
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The project manager works with a dozen different implementing partner organizations who do agriculture work across the country. Each implementing partner hires field agents who are responsible for visiting local villages and qualifying households to participate in the seed fair in the two weeks preceding the fair. They record information about the household and its members. Implementing partner supervisory staff also identify vendors from the local area who are willing to participate in the seed fair. They record information about the vendors and the planting material they intend to distribute. They negotiate maximum seed prices. When vendors arrive to setup for the fair the field agents check them in, record their presence, weigh their produce, inspect its quality, and allocate a section of the fair rounds where they will distribute planting materials. Tables are set up near the entrance of the grounds where field agents check in household members, verify that they are qualified to participate in the fair, record their presence, and provide them vouchers to use in exchange for planting materials. As household members exit the fairgrounds, field agents interview them regarding their experience and collect information on the quantity, variety, and availability of seed they either purchased or wished to purchase, how they intend to use it, and their overall satisfaction with the fair. At the close of the seed fair, vendors queue up at a pay station manned by field agents, where they exchange the vouchers they have collected for cash. They are also interviewed regarding their experience. Field agents turn in the following reports once they have reached the partner’s office: o List of households participating in the fair and their characteristics. o List of vendors participating in the fair and their characteristics o Record of the vouchers provided to each household o Record of the cash provided to each vendor o Answers to interview questions posed to household members and vendors. The partner office supervisor collates this information and provides it to the project manager. The project manager’s staff then digitizes the information and provides a report to the donor. Case Study In 2010, the CRS’ Central African Republic (CAR) Country Program was awarded an innovation grant to incorporate the use of barcoding for beneficiary identification in a project which involved the use of seed fairs to distribute planting materials to poor and vulnerable farm families by the CRS ICT4D Team. Agriculture technical advisors and ICT4D architect from the team engaged the country program staff in an effort to understand their needs. They first discussed how seed fairs were traditionally conducted in CAR, without any use of technology, and identified areas where technology might improve the efficiency seed fair operations and stewardship of seed fair funds. They laid out a process for conducting future seed fairs which involved: •
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Traveling to villages in the seed fair area, qualifying beneficiaries prior to the seed fair, pre-­‐
registering them to participate using mobile devices, and issuing them barcoded ID cards, Registering vendors setting up stalls at the fair at the start of the fair using mobile devices, Checking beneficiaries in at the seed fair using mobile device, scanning the bar-­‐coded vouchers they were given to use at the fair, and having them sign for the vouchers, Interviewing beneficiaries as the exited the seed fair to gage their satisfaction with services received, Collecting and scanning vouchers that the beneficiaries exchanged with vendors for seed at the end of the fair from the vendors. Issuing and recording payments to vendors based on voucher amounts. Creating reports for the project management team, auditors, and project donors. They identified the users that would be involved in use of a system to support these processes: French-­‐
speaking field workers that would use mobile devices to register beneficiaries, check-­‐in vendors and beneficiaries at the fair, and perform exit interviews; French speaking field supervisors who were managing the fair, and English speaking project staff, auditors, and donors who needed fair reports Following this discussion, the ICT4D architect traded off several technology solutions and proposed the use of a commercially available forms-­‐based data collection application that worked in off-­‐line mode, synchronized data to a cloud based data base when on-­‐line, supported capture of a wide range of data types including pictures, signatures, and bar codes, allowed for easy export of data to standard reporting tools ranging from excel to geospatial mapping systems and could very quickly be adapted to changing data collection needs. The product was provided by a company with a significant customer base and a proven support model. The architect also recommended particular devices and barcode scanners and software. The architect then configured the solution and the forms and reports and reviewed them and refined them on-­‐line with the country program team. Once the solution was configured, a simulation was scheduled in the country office with the implementing partners’ staff that was tasked with on-­‐the-­‐ground management and conduct of the seed fair. Based on feedback from the simulation an extra step was taken to record the weight of the seed each vendor brought and took away from the fair so it could be used to ensure that vendors were distributing the amount of seed for which they received vouchers. The simulation was followed by a field trial. Again feedback was gathered from the trial. Field workers recommended that the capability to share information between devices at the fair was essential to ensuring beneficiaries did not re-­‐enter lines to obtain an additional set of vouchers from a second field workers. Both the vendors and the field workers recommended that speed of scanning vouchers at the completion of the fair be improved. These improvements were incorporated into the subsequent CAR seed fairs. The time and effort to conduct seed fairs with and without technology were compared and cost savings were measured – 50% in early fairs, 75% in later fairs. Following success of efforts in CAR, the seed fair system was adapted for use in 6 countries: Burkina Faso, Rwanda, Madagascar, Malawi, DRC, and the Philippines. At each location users were involved in reviewing the CAR system configuration, refining it based on local needs, and piloting it before full scale use. Adaptations included configuring an English language interface to the system and adding fields to data collection forms and reports such as a project manager request to record the gender of the vendor representatives participating in a seed fair or a field agent’s request to display the head of household name when pulling up a household record to register an additional household member.