The Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) is the largest cotton sustainability programme in the world with the aim to transform cotton production worldwide by developing Better Cotton as a sustainable mainstream commodity. It has set an ambitious target to reach and train five million farmers on more sustainable practices and to have Better Cotton account for 30% of global cotton production by 2020.
The Better Cotton Innovation Challenge is a global platform that has been set up to help scale the BCI sustainability program. It aims to address opportunities within the BCI program that lend themselves to a breakthrough innovation approach as opposed to incremental improvements. The Challenge calls for innovative solutions from around the globe using cutting edge technology, design thinking, behavioural nudges.
The Challenge is expected to run through multiple rounds over the coming years and will cover a range of opportunities including how farmers are engaged, how trainings are conducted, how measurement of adoption are carried out and how the business model of the program is structured. The list of opportunities was developed in partnership with Dalberg Advisors through a thorough study of the BCI program.
Two opportunities have been shortlisted for the first round of the innovation challenge based on initial benchmarking that revealed that up to a ‘5X’ performance gain is possible in these activities based on innovations and methods in adjacent spaces. These two areas are:
For the complete details for challenge #1, download the 'Challenge 1 Knowledge Pack'.
We want to identify innovations that will lead to Better Cotton farmers receiving customized trainings based on their specific needs, preferences, and knowledge gaps. We recognize that this outcome can be driven through multiple pathways and are indifferent and non-prescriptive to the pathway innovators propose.
What we will be measuring are outcomes such as farmer satisfaction, incremental adoption of Better Cotton practices, and minimization of Type I & II errors in training relevance (training content that is included in a session but is redundant and not useful or could have been useful but was not included).
A farmer in the BCI program makes multiple decisions during a growing cycle, such as the selection of pesticides / seeds, time for harvest and duration of remedial measures, and ways of increasing efficiency of farming practices. To do this, Field Facilitators deliver trainings on what ‘better’ cotton is and how farmers can grow it. Training and on-going supports helps farmers improve their agricultural practices, often in the face of extreme and unpredictable weather condition – while reducing costs and increasing yield of cotton.
Training content: Trainings modules conducted with farmers include Integrated Pest Management approach, responsible pesticide usage, awareness on decent work, water usage practices and soil health among others.
Delivery Methods: The mode of delivery varies from being trainer-led instructions, printed collateral, field visits and sometimes via videos.
Delivery Process: Farmer discussions are held before the start of the crop cycle where field facilitators understand farmer needs. Training content is then delivered by Field Facilitators via in-person group trainings consisting of ~35 farmers (LG level) each. Field Facilitators conduct follow-up meetings to allow farmers to clarify any doubts or request for more information on a certain topic.
While current methods of training have positively affected farmer knowledge and incomes, the impact has been limited due limited training time and content repetition. We found that farmer needs, and aspirations vary significantly depending on factors such as farm-holding size, previous experiences, skills, and attitudes. Each farmer requires a slightly different form of support and at different times. Since the needs of each farmer are unique, they can benefit significantly from customization.
While there have been significant advances in digital education and training across the world and customized learning is becoming the norm in many classrooms, on-ground farmer training is still largely static and complex as it has both “know-how” and “know-what” dimensions and gets carried out in field environments with several external limiting factors.
Some of these factors include:
Innovations over the years have made it possible to provide customization in different ways that are intuitive and adaptive. These include ‘adaptive customization’ where algorithms provide unique advice to each farmer, ‘personalized training tools and coaching’ where each farmer is provided access to practical non-tech field based tools and on-going support, democratizing content creation where local and applicable content is created through a participatory process for face to face and / or online use, remote video-based engagement to drive adherence, voice / speech-based learning technologies to increase ease of use and many others.
We are looking for the next big innovation across the value chain of providing customized learning – be it improving the segmentation process of farmers, matching content to appropriate segments or actually delivering content.
Your innovation may follow one (or more) of the pathways mentioned below:
Note: This list of pathways above remains non-exhaustive and illustrative.
The Better Cotton Initiative is a real world program operating at scale and it is essential that innovations identified or created through the Challenge operate within some key real world constraints of the program. These include:
For the complete details for challenge #2, download the ‘Challenge 2 Knowledge Pack’.
We want to identify innovations that will lead to a vastly more efficient process, in terms of time and cost, of collecting Better Cotton farming data from farmers to enable verification and certification of Better Cotton. This improvement will help drive scale with fewer resources and will lead to more sustainable cotton production globally. We recognize that this outcome can be driven through multiple and are indifferent and non-prescriptive to the pathway innovators propose.
What we will be measuring are outcomes such as reductions in the total time and cost needed in the system to collect relevant data to assess whether farmers have adopted Better Cotton practices or not and to what extent. Error rates would need to be similar to the existing system of collecting data.
Farmers and field-facilitators work together to improve cotton agriculture and produce better cotton for all. To do this well and assure brands that the cotton produced is truly ‘better’, a range of metrics are tracked by BCI. Data is collected throughout the crop cycle spanning 9-10 months. For example, at the beginning of the season, data on land size is collected, mid-season on quantity of water and pesticides used, and at the end of the season bags of cotton produced.
Data collection helps achieve two things – helping determine compliance of better cotton production practices on the ground and track progress of farmers on pesticide, fertilizer, and water use among other things.
Each farmer owns a Farmer Field Book where they record this information with support from Field Facilitators. Field Facilitators meet farmers about ~3 times a month for meetings / trainings and capture data in-person in a group or individually through house visits. The data entered in Farmer Field Books is also verified by Field Facilitators through field observations and bill verification.
The data verified by Field Facilitators undergoes another round of verification by the Production Unit manager that oversees the operations of the Field Facilitators in their unit. The data is verified randomly every ~15 days.
© BCI/Paulo Escudeiro 2018
The current process results in the collection of ~200,000 data points over ~12,000 interactions at the Production Unit level. Per farmer, roughly 50 data points are collected in a year. Field Facilitators spend ~50-70% of their time in data collection and verification that translates to high annual costs and time per farmer.
There is an opportunity to increase the efficiency with which this data is collected and to drastically reduce the time and cost of the program and help scale it to many more farmers.
The current data collection process is time consuming due to a range of drivers:
Innovations over the years have made it possible to collect and document data in a resource efficient manner. These include IVRS based data collection that provides a means to collect last mile data, satellite augmented data collection that uses image recognition, artificial intelligence and machine learning that can read and digitize various formats of data, behaviour change trainings among farmers coupled with non-monetary incentives, and re-designing the farmer field book in favour of self-reporting.
We are looking for the next big innovation that can further improve the way the BCI program facilitates data collection and documentation.
Your innovation may follow one (or more) of the pathways mentioned below:
Note: This list of pathways above remains non-exhaustive and illustrative.
The Better Cotton Initiative is a real world program operating at scale and it is essential that innovations identified or created through the Challenge operate within some key real world constraints of the program. Your innovation should be a data-capture system that reduces the cost of collection and documentation by Field Facilitators keeping in mind the following constraints:
View challenge rules here.
The Challenge is open to any individual, institution or organization irrespective of country of origin. We invite innovators from design, technology, behavioural science and all other relevant fields.
All you need to do is meet the following criteria:
Prototyping capability: While support (both financial and technical) will be provided, entrants are expected to have the capability to develop prototypes to test on the ground.
Willingness to conduct trials on the ground: While the Challenge is global and innovators can come from all over the world, the innovators will be expected to conduct trials in one of the BCI intervention countries.
Legal compliance: All entrants must be legally complaint with the laws of their country of origin and not be in conflict with local laws of the solution testing countries. In addition, entrants must be compliant with the laws of Better Cotton Growth and Innovation Fund.
Your solution will be evaluated based on seven criteria across the three stages of the Challenge detailed below.
Is the solution effective?
Is it adaptive and improving?
Is it scalable and replicable?
Is it financially sustainable?
Is it novel and new to the BCI programme?
Is the team capable to implement the solution?
Is the on-ground test proposed practical?
Details on the Challenge evaluation can be found here: Challenge Evaluation Details
