The SEWA Federation have been running a farm to table programme for 5 years, where they aggregate vegetables grown by members of SEWA’s Megha and Kheda cooperatives and market them via WhatsApp. The farmers are familiar with WhatsApp and want to keep this means of connecting their local communities, but lose a lot of time typing out the names of vegetables, computing and issuing invoices. They asked for an app to be developed which automates the ordering process. Customers have a notion that this should be simple—they want this to be “click and go.”
Saamarth is a Sanskrit term indicating “capability” or “strength,” and is an umbrella term used by SEWA for a variety of commercial activities already underway throughout the Federation, for which they use a WordPress e-commerce site. However, managing this site takes up a lot of staff time and is inflexible regarding managing stock and offers, and must be maintained by specially-trained technical staff. The Data Communities for Inclusion project took up the challenge of developing a custom mobile app based on Google Sheets (already a literacy amongst some Federation staff) as a backend to track stock, prices, availability, users and ordering. The resulting app costs just tens of dollars per year to host and can be fully managed in only a few minutes per day by a Federation staff member who can issue any produce available, collect orders and issue invoices, opening and closing the storefront on demand. The choice of Google Sheets gives access, via a familiar front-end, to elite back-end capabilities such as access control, a data edit audit trail, backups, as well as powerful business analytics enabling insight into customer- or product-oriented statistics. These capabilities would have been extremely expensive and slow to deliver under a conventional development model.
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