Impact areas
Food Security
Sustainable agriculture can play a crucial role in addressing food security challenges in the developing world. By adopting sustainable farming practices, farmers can improve the productivity and resilience of their land, increase their yields, and produce food in a way that is environmentally and socially responsible. Powered by Opus™, organisations will be able to achieve food security by helping farmers achieve:
- Improved soil health: Sustainable agriculture practices such as crop rotation, intercropping, and the use of organic fertilizers can improve soil health, which in turn increases the productivity and resilience of the land. Healthier soil can also sequester carbon, reducing the impact of agriculture on climate change.
- Diversification: Sustainable agriculture encourages diversification of crops, which can provide a more varied and nutritious diet for farmers and their communities. Diversification can also reduce the risk of crop failure due to pests, disease, or weather events.
- Water conservation: Sustainable agriculture practices such as conservation tillage, drip irrigation, and rainwater harvesting can help conserve water resources, which is especially important in areas where water is scarce.
- Reduced use of pesticides and herbicides: Sustainable agriculture practices can reduce the use of synthetic pesticides and herbicides, which can have negative impacts on human health and the environment.
- Preservation of biodiversity: Sustainable agriculture practices can help preserve biodiversity by promoting the use of native crops and the protection of natural habitats.
Youth employment
Youth unemployment is a massive and growing problem in Kenya. While millions of youth are accredited in agricultural practices, small-scale farming is seen as hard, unrewarding work and generally spurned. Opus™ makes it possible for the government to engage youth in agriculture en mass. This is why we are coining the YFA (Youth Follow-Along) concept – an activity where qualified you choose to assist agents on a task-by-task basis to deliver agriculture extension services.
Because Opus™ is a publicly available app on the Google Play store, anyone can download it and create an account, listing their location, skills, and experience. Once youth have registered, they will appear on the “YouthFollowAlong” page, which can be accessed from the dashboard.
The project manager vets the youth, marks them as “Active” and can then assign them as co-assignees on the tasks page. When a youth Opus™ agent is selected as a co-assignee, they receive a task invitation on their Opus account, chat with their paired enumerator via the “chat” page on their app, and accompany the enumerator to complete a Crop Cut in the field. The tasks that youth complete make up a live portfolio of projects visible on the youths’ Opus™ profile page.
This approach was validated during our trial. What’s more, we have registered over 250 youth from universities around Kenya and pre-registered an additional 98,760 of them through TVETs. By giving every unemployed youth in Kenya the chance to access hands-on experience and help agents deliver agricultural services to farmers, we look forward to bringing a generation of young Kenyans into agriculture.
To make the YFA experience rewarding and safe for youth, we have placed stringent limits on the activities that youth will be able to engage in while on placement. We also plan to audit all YFA experiences while the feature is being tested – using our built-in task auditing feature. In addition, we have created rules for agent pairing to ensure a safe experience for female YFA participants. For example, female participants under the age of 25 cannot be paired with a male field agent.
gender equality
Opus™ is able to address four key barriers that prevent women from entering the agriculture sector in Kenya. These include location, time flexibility, job safety, and discrimination.
- Location: using our platform, women can perform jobs from their villages, and do not need to commute to cities to secure work;
- Time Flexibility: women who are caretakers for children or the elderly can still find flexible gigs that fit into their schedule;
- Job Safety: by transforming informal gigs into official tasks, we can screen job opportunities and track gender safety on the ground, guaranteeing every woman safe and uplifting work.
- No Discrimination: our software is designed to eliminate gender bias, making it possible for qualified women to get the same jobs as similarly qualified men.
Additionally, using targeting employment by directing task orders to qualified women living near farms, Opus™ can transform gender equality in the agriculture sector.
environmental sustainability
Resilient agriculture is sustainable agriculture. We plan to accelerate efforts to make 100% of the global farmland environmentally resilient and sustainable. Our built-in auditing system (see here) makes it possible to account holistically for the environmental gains from a project, as they take place.
Financial transparency
Few of the funds allocated to agriculture extension actually go to farmers. This is because the management and oversight of current extension systems are so top-heavy that much of the allocated budget gets consumed just by setting up, running, and monitoring projects. More funds yet are required to do lengthy quality insurance, which requires project managers going to speak with farmers.
Opus™ is set up to help allocate as much of their budget as possible to actually servicing farmers. Of the funds that are spent paying staff to deliver services, every cent is tracked all the way to the ground, earmarked for specific environmental and social impact, and automatically audited.
This watertight approach to project finance management makes it effortless to track every dollar spent and connect financial investment with social and environmental impact – on a per-task basis!