The Token Administration Platform (TAP)

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1 The Token Administration Platform (TAP) Figure 1: A Successful Redemption in FCT, Nigeria The Growth Enhancement Scheme (GES), Nigeria, operated by the Nigerian Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (FMARD), delivers vouchers to subsistence farmers who farm up to 5 hectares. These vouchers are used to subsidise the cost of fertiliser, seeds and other agricultural inputs. In previous years, attempts were made to deliver the vouchers by mobile phone, but the lack of mobile network coverage and the limited number of farmers who own their own mobile devices forced the scheme to rely on paper records, which then had to be manually entered into the scheme database. As a result GES experienced low levels of uptake and long delays in settling payments with the Agro-Dealers who supply the agricultural inputs. Consult Hyperion and AFAP (African Fertilizer and Agribusiness Partnership) were commissioned by the UK Government s Department for International Development (DFID) to review the technical and operational aspects of the GES service, respectively. Consult Hyperion specifically assessed the operation and security of the infrastructure supporting GES whereas AFAP assessed the supply chain and agriculture dynamics of the scheme. Consult Hyperion and AFAP interviewed numerous stakeholders in country including members of the ministerial team in charge, commercial organisations involved in supplying the technology and the supply chain (including Agro-Dealers) to inform the report. The results of this analysis were summarised in a report submitted directly to the Honourable Minister for Agriculture and to the UK s Department for International Development (DFID). It proposed improved methods of identifying farmers, enhancing mobile connectivity and improving organisation of farmer data held in the GES database. It concluded by outlining alternative technical options for identifying and authenticating the voucher recipient. Proof of concept demonstrations of the various options were presented to the Honourable Minster and DFID, who subsequently commissioned Consult Hyperion and the International Fertilizer Development Centre (IFDC) to deliver a pilot to evaluate the most promising solution.

2 IFDC were responsible for the on-the-ground operation of the TAP Service in Nigeria, including the selection and training of Enumerators and Field Officers to support the enumeration of farmers and the redemption of vouchers. Consult Hyperion was responsible for the design of the TAP service, the delivery and operation of the TAP Platform, the initial training of IFDC Staff, Enumerators and Field Officers and technical support throughout the period. Operating in FCT and Sokoto between March and September 2014, the Token Administration Platform (TAP) registered in excess of 500,000 farmers to the GES scheme. During this pilot just under 80% of the registered farmers used 1.2 million vouchers issued to them by the TAP service, with the total subsidy delivered in excess of US$19 million. At its peak, IFDC used the GES TAP platform to register more than 10,000 farmers per day. So How Does it Work? TAP uses the latest mobile technology to connect online and offline farmers to their local agricultural dealers, enabling farmers in remote regions where there is no network coverage to have access to the GES fertiliser discount scheme. It offers full weekly reconciliation reports so that farmers get their vouchers quicker and agricultural dealers receive their reconciliations quicker; it also has builtin fraud prevention and detection systems. Figure 2: An Enumerator Taking a Farmer's Photograph. Drop Down Menus in TAP Application Enumerators are issued with an android tablet, which they use to collect the information needed to register the farmer for GES. This includes photographs of both their face and their identity card. The information is entered into the TAP Application running on the tablet, which uses drop down menus, containing pre-populated data, to facilitate data entry and minimise the opportunity for user error. On completion the Enumerator issues the farmer with a TAP smartcard, by tapping the card against the reader. Where a farmer doesn t have an acceptable identity card, they can still be registered for GES via the GES TAP service, by being sponsored by someone they know who does have an identity card and has already been registered. In this case, the sponsor acts as a guarantor but can only sponsor a maximum of 5 farmers. During the pilot, sponsored farmers were issued with a black card, instead of the standard green card. If any irregularities occurred, all farmers linked to the guarantor would be frozen while the irregularity was further investigated.

3 Figure 3: A Sponsored Farmer and Her Sponsor with their TAP Cards, Redemption in Sokoto State The TAP card is used to authenticate the farmer to the TAP service whenever they interact with the service, for example when they visit an Agro-Dealer to purchase agricultural inputs using the vouchers they have been issued. In order to participate in TAP, Agro-Dealers must have a suitable Android tablet, with the TAP Application installed. When the farmer taps their card against the Agro-Dealer s tablet, their picture is displayed together with the vouchers that are available to them. The picture is used to authenticate the farmer, who can then choose which vouchers they would like to use. People-Powered Mesh Networking In previous years, getting the farmer s enumeration and redemption data back to the GES database was slow, inefficient, and in some cases impossible. But the TAP service is designed to operate in areas of poor or no network coverage, using NFC (Near Field Communications) and people-powered mesh networking to transfer data to and from field staff devices. All farmer enumerations are completed offline, with the relevant information stored on the Enumerator s tablet. Whenever it is convenient, a Field Officer will collect the data from the Enumerator s tablet, simply by tapping the two devices together which causes the TAP application to synchronise the data stored on both devices. The Field Officer will then either pass the data to their supervisor s tablet, in a similar fashion, or carry their tablet into a Wi-Fi hotspot or GSM coverage, where it synchronises with the TAP database. At this point, information about newly registered farmers is sent to the TAP Server; the server will process them, see whether they are eligible for any vouchers, and create those vouchers. The newly created vouchers will then be sent to a Field Officer s tablet, to be transferred to the Agro-Dealer s tablet, using people-power mesh networking. When the Field Officer s tablet next comes into contact with the appropriate Agro-Dealer s tablet, all of the vouchers for farmers allocated to that Agro-Dealer are transferred to the retailer s tablet, so that they are available for redemption. Similarly, details about vouchers redeemed by farmers are transferred to the Field Officer s tablet, to be transferred to the TAP server. New vouchers can be created at any time. Once the details are agreed, the voucher packages are created at the TAP back office. The TAP server then compares farmers enumeration details with the eligibility criteria of the new voucher package, and vouchers are created for all those that match. The vouchers are disbursed to the relevant Agro-Dealers tablets, ready for redemption by farmers,

4 in the usual way. In Sokoto State, an area of particularly poor mobile communications, vouchers were available at the Agro-Dealer just two days after the Farmer registered to the GES TAP service, and details of redemptions of the new vouchers in some of the most remote communities were available at the TAP server the following day. Reporting Figure 4: Field Officer in FCT; GES TAP Dashboard showing enumeration hotspots in FCT State Significant reporting capabilities for both the operators of the TAP Service and its sponsors are readily available within the TAP Server s Back Office. These include the number of registrations per Enumerator, details of the farmers enumerated (by Enumerator, by gender, age and type of registration), redemptions per Agro-Dealer, vouchers redeemed (by farmer, by gender, location, by registration type). The GES TAP service has been designed to deliver a range of standardised reports, some of which can be configured for specific stakeholders. In addition, for more technically sophisticated stakeholders, there is an advanced data mining capability built-in. Securing Personal Data With enumeration levels in excess of 10,000 farmers a day, there are significant levels of personal data stored on tablets in the field, the security of which is of paramount concern to the operators of the service, Consult Hyperion and IFDC Nigeria. In line with global best practice, all the data stored on the TAP tablet and passed to the TAP server is encrypted. Access to the TAP application on the tablets is controlled by TAP Smartcards and PINs, provided to the Enumerator, Field Officers and Agro-Dealers when they are selected for their roles. The individual completing an activity is recorded together with the time and location, when they tap their card against the tablet and enter their PIN to complete the action. This allows for traceability within the system and ensures each actor is held accountable for their actions. It also allows the Field Officers to identify those individuals who might require additional training as, say, the records of the farmers they have enumerated contain lots of errors, or might be completing fraudulent activities, e.g. redeeming vouchers when the Agro-Dealer s store is closed. Such remote management has allowed the IFDC Nigeria team to rapidly employ large numbers of enumerators with little or no enumeration experience. Typically these were young women, interested in getting access to and experience of the agricultural sector and the latest technology.

5 Results Figure 4: Redemption in Sokoto State In the 6 month period between March and August, IFDC Nigeria was able to enumerate in excess of 492,000 Farmers in two Nigerian States, FCT and Sokoto. More than 75% of those Farmers redeemed the vouchers they were offered, purchasing in excess of $19 million worth of fertiliser and seed from 100 Agro-Dealer shops or Redemption Centres. To complete this task, IFDC Nigeria employed more than 500 staff, predominately young females, one of whom commented: Everything is real! I can see things happening and I believe that the farmers in the system exist The Nigerian Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, commented: In terms of time to register the farmers we have cut it down, so with 250 staff or Enumerators we can register per day 10,000 farmers. You can see the speed of registering farmers. The second is the speed of redeeming seeds and fertilizers by farmers has been cut down to a minute, sixty seconds. So instead of waiting on a queue and all that because of people going through records, we have got rid of it. This means farmers don t have to wait long, you have saved their time. Identity management is better. The speed of reconciliation of transaction is immediate and all that information shows off at the banks and the Central Bank. (