Started in December 2020, Grameen led the first phase of the Market Access eNabled by Digital Innovation in India (MANDI) initiative, with support from the Walmart Foundation. Over 29 months, the first phase of MANDI aimed to strengthen Farmer Producer Organizations’ (FPOs) capacity to connect smallholder farmers, especially women, to markets and finance, to improve farmers’ incomes and resilience. The project was designed to build the capacity of 40 FPOs and their 10,000 smallholder farmers (40% women) in eastern Uttar Pradesh in four key areas: Improved market linkages, digitization and data for decision-making, gender and women’s enablement and financing for resilience. Notable achievements of MANDI Phase I are as follows:
- 8,348 new women members were added to FPOs, resulting in a more than 200% increase in the average female membership across the project FPOs from the baseline.
- 95% of FPOs had at least one woman member on the board.
- 72.5% of FPOs were linked with at least one public or private financing scheme.
- Two-thirds of FPOs reported positive growth, with an average growth rate of 315% and an average sales turnover of INR 6.2 million.
- 20 FPOs secured formal credit, with INR 90.5 million mobilized in the form of credit and grants.
- Around 9,600 farmers were benefited from FPOs’ uptake of 14 agricultural technologies which include digital, climate-smart, and women-friendly technologies.
Based on the learnings from the first phase of MANDI, the second phase started in June 2023. MANDI II is being implemented across 48 FPOs in Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. It aims to favorably impact the lives and livelihoods of 35,000 farmers (at least 50% of them women).
In this project, Grameen is closely collaborating with 10 FPOs in the Hub and Spoke (H&S) model in Eastern Uttar Pradesh to develop a proof of concept (PoC). Additionally, Grameen is working with the remaining non-PoC FPOs (33 in Eastern Uttar Pradesh and 5 in West Bengal) to promote gender mainstreaming, aggregation, economies of scale, and timely linkages with markets, finance, and technology.
