One Acre Fund - Automating Manual Processes to Improve Payment Timeliness and Operator Retention

sefinew

Name: Sefinew Aragie

Title: Senior Data and Operation Specialist

Country: Ethiopia

Organization: One Acre Fund

One Acre Fund –Ethiopia (Charity No 3241) is an organization dedicated to pioneering proven solutions for sustainably increasing the productivity of the world’s poorest farm families. One Acre Fund’s mission is to work with partners in a sustainable way to improve the productivity and prosperity of smallholder farm families while protecting the environment.

Awards Categories:

• Most Impactful Ikig.AI Story
• Best Positive Impact Use Case

Business Challenge:

I am working for one International NGO called One Acre Fund which is engaging in the agricultural and environmental protection sector.

I am addressing a challenge related to data management for this organization's Ethiopia operations. I was registering 230,000 farmers data who took 20 million seedlings with different species. The data was recorded using the Kobo toolbox and needs to be compared with different records including KPI, MOU, Summery, and back checkers data. Doing this using Kobo and Google Sheets was not easy as the data was very large.

Business Solution:

Thanks to @Emiel_Veersma
, I was trained and brainstormed ideas for how Dataiku could help. We were quickly able to import the different sources of data to Dataiku through the API and Google Sheets plugins. Then I ran some recipes and the job was done very easily.

Day-to-day Change:

Before, the seven members of my team were spending a lot of time managing data quality manually, along with 65 temporary volunteers. Now with Dataiku, everything is automated. KPIs are updated in real-time and data is ready for any summary.

Business Area Enhanced: Analytics

Use Case Stage: Built & Functional

Value Generated:

• Improve payment timeliness: We will now be paying our Tree Nursery Operators (TNOs) on time as the data quality has increased and less resources are needed to perform the process.
• Customer retention: Higher retention of our TNOs next year as their satisfaction has increased through on-time payment.
• Revenue gain: Our organization expects higher revenue from improved TNO retention and satisfaction.

Value Brought by Dataiku:

Dataiku made data cleaning, organizing, and analysis very quick and simple. It brought multiple benefits, such as:

1. Improved data quality (much less manual work)

2. More efficient workforce

3. Better insights in the data

4. More up to date data

5. Opportunities for the country teams to start thinking about more complex tasks (for example, we've been able to start checking recent deforestation for new submissions, which was not possible before).

Value Type:

• Improve customer/employee satisfaction
• Reduce cost
• Save time
• Increase trust