Climate Edge Software as a Service Platform
Climate Edge enables organisations to deliver information services to agricultural communities at scale, translating complicated services into SMS format to make them accessible to smallholder farmers across the digital divide.
The value of agricultural advisory services
Advisory services are the cornerstone of agriculture. Farmers depend on late blight alerts to decide when to spray their crop and irrigation scheduling tells them how much to water.
It has been proven that access to these types of services can increase farm income by more than 80%
No availability in emerging agriculture
Services that we take for granted within the UK, such as late blight alerts, are simply not available within emerging markets. In fact over 90% of sub-saharan smallholder farmers have zero access to any type of value-adding service.
From research to service
Fundamentally, commercialising services within this environment is a unique challenge and providers lack the tools needed to succeed.
Advisory services typically start their life as scientific research. But whilst academics are experts in generating IP (Intellectual Property), they lack expertise in building scalable software or products. Consequently, the vast majority of valuable science based ideas and services never even enter the product development stage.
Climate Edge solves this problem, offering a service development toolkit and software platform.
How it works
1.
Climate Edge works with Service Providers to create a new or integrate an existing service on our platform
2.
We utilise our centralised data APIs, SMS integration and payment gateway to facilitate delivery to farmers
3.
The service is made available to our independent network of farmers who can pay to receive the service remotely
Here an example of a weather forecast which is delivered to farmers via SMS, avoiding the need for an internet connection.
Climate Edge Data Collection App
This app eases the process of data collection by agronomists who go from farm to farm, supporting smallholders, dependent on individual farm requirement and environmental conditions.
The user can create questions for surveys, schedule these surveys to be completed with specific farmers and then conduct these on the farm, even without internet availability. This process saves a lot of time for already overstretched agronomists, saving the need to laboriously construct and print questionnaires, fill them out by hand and transcribe the notes into spreadsheets.
Since every cooperative might have different needs, all questions can be customised and then requested by the app via API. The same counts for the answers, they are stored locally if no internet available and then eventually sent to the central database without the tedious transcribing needed. This saves the agronomist valuable time which they can spend supporting farmers directly with their knowledge.
Project Information
This work was created and is owned by Climate Edge Ltd. My responsibility as Chief Design Officer at Climate Edge is user experience, interaction design, user interface design and as part of the senior management team I am also involved in business strategy and business relations.