Designed a toolkit & curriculum to help 4600 Cambodian farmers sell surplus produce

The Context

Chronic undernutrition (stunting) is prevalent among many subsistent farmers in Cambodia, negatively impacting their health, productivity, and educational attainment.

Family Farms for the Future (FF4F) was an initiative funded by Global Affairs and the International Development Research Centre of Canada and executed by Helen Keller International and the University of British Columbia. The objective was to improve nutrition and household food security, economic livelihoods, and female empowerment by providing Cambodian families in 232 villages with their own farm (a mix of gardens, fish ponds, and poultry farms). Each village also had a support village model farm (VMF) and training on agriculture, nutrition, entrepreneurship, and women’s empowerment.

The Challenge

The team was brought on to design the entrepreneurship curriculum, including a training manual, activities, and a toolkit to help Cambodian farmer entrepreneurs sell their surplus produce for additional income.

The Process

01- Too much business jargon

I was brought on to help complete the first iteration over one weekend to meet stakeholder timelines. As a new team member, I was eager to understand the context, the desired outcomes of the toolkit, as well as information on who the farmers were and their main pain points, knowing that without a user-centered mindset, what we produced likely wouldn’t deliver intended impacts.

02- Human Centered Design

Luckily, a design strategist had done the very field work I was asking for, and lead us through a human-centered-design sprint. Over the course of 3 days we went over her fieldwork insights on the Cambodian farmer, key design principles for ideation, then diverged to brainstorm solutions, and converged back to prioritize the top tools.

For a project where I was the key researcher, check out Pzzzow Head.

On top of the design strategist’s insights, key principles I took away from the experience and my readings were that our training methods needed to be interactive (the learning culture relied on role modelling and shared experiences vs reading), our tools needed to be simple to use, and deliver obvious benefit each time used to encourage sustained usage- in other words: they needed to be interactive, simple, and sticky.

03- Keep it interactive, simple, and sticky

After our expert left, we now had to design these tools from the ground up ourselves.

I was vocal on making sure we kept to our north star- making things interactive, simple, and sticky for the farmers. With the team unsure of how to proceed, I suggested building upon our ideas along a user journey map and reconvening to debrief ideas by asking ourselves, “does this align with the design principles and our end objective?”

We landed on 5 tools that facilitated farmer-to-farmer price sharing (addressing market information asymmetry due to middlemen who dominated the market), income tracking (many farmers thought farming was unprofitable because they looked at their leftover cash at the end of the day after living expenses), improved crop selection decision making (to help optimize their produce for profitability), and branding (Cambodian farmers didn’t realize consumers valued local produce over the Vietnamese counterparts, and were consistently getting paid less from middlemen).

04- Communicating our theory of change

Despite low literacy amidst our end beneficiaries, Helen Keller International wanted the training manual delivered in written format. I knew the manual would be used by HKI facilitators as the primary way to train field agents, and then taught in Cambodian to farmers, so our theory of change needed to be obvious to prevent getting lost in translation.

I put together an executive summary to link the tools to our design principles and intended outcomes, and suggested we open the manual with an overview of the training program’s purpose, the design principles, and the rationale behind tools chosen, so our hypotheses and theory of change would be clear and could at any time be challenged. I also suggested we start each topic with the design principle link and how the tool would work, because I believed that our logic and intent should be crystal clear so it could iteratively be improved upon.

The team loved this format and nominated me to lead 3 out of 5 tools and present our second draft to the stakeholders in Cambodia. This also proved to be highly useful in the stakeholder meeting and served as the framework of discussion.



05- Many voices in one room

I represented the team in Cambodia and met with 10 members from the International Development Research Centre of Canada, HKI, field officers, and academic partners. The primary objective was to collect feedback to make sure our solution addressed the real needs of the farmers.

To make the most of our time, I facilitated a prep meeting with the team to synthesize key questions organized by topic for HKI, key inputs we required, and why. We also sent the full training manual ahead of time, and I facilitated the discussion based on high level aims and context, then a by-topic discussion using our questions as a guidline, followed with next steps.

This being my first cross-culture, development meeting, I was astounded at the diversity of views held by the expat HKI representatives to local village trainers and Canadian government representatives. It made me truly realize that good design requires an understanding of the REAL underlying problems and the cultures and systems that surround the end user.

The crux of the discussion was:

• Limit the content and number of tools to reduce duplication. Some of the recommended tools were similar to existing materials (field officers already had a revenue ledger for farmers to help gather project outcomes- the issue was these weren’t being filled out)

• Some hypotheses made on the farmers’ needs were not reflective of reality (ie. fertilizer and pesticide costs were minimal and saving to buy was not a significant issue, conversely, one of HKI’s goals was to prevent farmers from overusing them)

• Due to resource limitations, HKI would not be able to execute a full fledged marketing program to address the ‘branding’ barrier

I captured feedback and new ideas discussed against our recommended tools so we could see the changes made. I also created a new document with proposed next steps to make sure all stakeholders involved ultimately aligned on the purpose of each tool, since the actual tool itself would be iterated on.

05- Time to Revise!

Due to budget restraints I was unable to physically present the final revisions in Cambodia, but I led the team throughout the process of revising our toolbook based off feedback from our meeting. In the end we received positive feedback and a successful pilot was launched with positive results on Cambodian farmers’ financial planning abilities, crop selection decision-making and market access.

06- Writing a summary infographic for the final technical report

Months after launching the toolkit with HKI, I reached out to the research team to help with official reporting. I was astounded with the breadth of the project and how our entrepreneurship work fit into this massive 2-phased research project.

As this was primarily a nutrition initiative, the existing reports were highly technical and focused on nutrition outcomes. An opportunity existed to summarize key outcomes of the project for a broader audience.

First, I made sure to clarify the researcher’s objective, which was to share findings with their funders and the international development community. Since summarizing outcomes to the funder was a key priority, I asked what the funder’s primary goals were, and suggested we use this as a framework to show results.

After identifying the reporting framework (food security, nutrition, gender empowerment, livelihoods, policy impact), I proceeded to read through the technical reports to provide myself context and tease out relevant metrics. I continued to ask myself: Does this metric address the development goal (ie. does it show impact to nutrition)? Is it compelling? Is it easily understandable? What metric could capture the intent better?

I continued to host check-in meetings with the researchers to make sure I was properly reflecting the outcomes, and to brainstorm ways to show the impact better.

Finally, I facilitated alignment to the key metrics, and produced the official infographic that was submitted to IDRC as well as a written report summarizing all research outcomes of the project.

The final output

For a project where I was the key researcher, check out Pzzzow Head (user interviews, prototypes, user testing, surveys).