Webinars
Between August 2016 and January 2017, ATAI delivered a four-part webinar series to OCP’s staff working on business development and research. OCP, based in Morocco, is one of the world’s largest fertilizer producers. These sessions introduced OCP to ATAI’s approach to testing strategies to increase technology adoption and presented evidence on the four constraint areas discussed in ATAI’s Emerging Insights series: credit & savings, information, risk, input / output inefficiencies, with additional discussion of applications of information communications technology.
The first webinar reviewed insights from randomized evaluations on information constraints to agricultural technology adoption and potential improvements to extension services. The second discussed why the traditional microcredit model might not work well in the context of agriculture and overviewed four evaluations that tested credit products designed to better fit farmer’s credit needs. In the third webinar, ATAI shared evidence on the demand for and impact of weather-based index insurance as well as the promising results on risk-mitigating crops, such as Swarna-sub1. The last webinar discussed how inefficiencies in input and output markets can constrain technology adoption and shared some examples of ICT interventions to increase access to digital financial services, information (price and extension), and interactive platforms.
