How data, benchmarks, and deep insights of agribusinesses can boost your impact
On 1 December, Lucas Simons led a webinar where he unveiled a way development practitioners can provide more effective support to agribusinesses. Through SCOPEinsight’s Business Intelligence (BI) Platform (Essential), development professionals are able to – within minutes – know the strengths and weaknesses of their agribusinesses, report to stakeholders more effectively, and improve their professional performance. Also unveiled during the webinar was the Business Intelligence Platform (Advanced), which uses predictive analytics to show the relationship between more professional agribusinesses and the most important development goals.
Business Intelligence Essential: More effective support, better performance, quicker reporting
Through the BI Essential, every client who uses SCOPEinsight data will have access to a personal portal where they can learn more about their assessment results. This portal will easily allow clients to gain insights into their assessed agribusinesses. Clients can easily compare assessment data to other assessments they have done, as well as to the country, the region, and the world. Clients can also see the strengths and weaknesses of their assessed organizations more easily, which will make capacity building easier. And all the information required for reporting to stakeholders will be in one place, which will allow clients to download it all with a click of the button.
The portal will easily show the total score for a project, as well as the scores for each of the eight SCOPE dimensions. These standardized scores measure how well the agribusiness manages their business, no matter what sector, and thus can be compared easily between organizations. The portal also makes it easy to compare an agribusiness against the averages for the country, region, and world. Clients can also see any dimension in more detail, including subdimension data that helps pinpoint strengths and weaknesses. This information can be used by capacity builders to tailor training programs and improve the performance of the agribusinesses in the most effective way.
All the available information about the SCOPE scores, as well as demographic data like the gender breakdown of the agribusiness membership, means that communicating results is convenient and easy. Having all the data in one place can save a great deal of time in reporting to stakeholders.
Business Intelligence Advanced: Understand complex relationships, validate assumptions, more impact
As well as the BI Essential, we are also offering the BI Advanced. This platform will have additional insights into the data that we share and will specifically look at relationships with important impact areas. To do this, we are selecting topics from the agricultural sector and creating predictive models to assess them. For our first topic, we have chosen living income. We have created a model that can assess how likely it is that an agribusiness can provide a living income to its members. Our next topic will be access to finance, and in the future, we also intend to create models for deforestation, child labor, technology and input adaptation, and many more topics. After testing and validating these models, we can use them to predict future risks for agribusinesses.
We have established a formula for living income, as seen to the left. While not all the drivers of living income are within the control of the agribusiness, other drivers can be influenced. In particular, agribusinesses can influence yields, costs of production, and diversification. We then linked the formula to our questionnaire and found that some questions have a significant influence on living income. We are focusing on these questions for this model. After running our data through the completed model, we were able to see the actual distribution of agribusinesses’ ability to provide a living income (as shown in the bar graph above).
We found that some agribusinesses are already able to provide a living income, but only a small fraction. A significant group is almost there, and the majority need support to reach this point. This is important because agribusinesses are normally not a part of the conversation on living income. By showing that they play a vital role in the process, we can reframe the conversation to include them and hopefully increase the number of agribusinesses who can provide a living income. This is a game-changer in the sector, and we hope it will be part of the solution to this problem.
We are not solving it by ourselves. We are just adding this ingredient so that you can do your work even more effectively. That’s what it’s all about.
Lucas Simons
How can we work together on this?
If you are not yet working with SCOPEinsight, reach out to us to see how we can work together! Contact us at info@scopeinsight.com
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