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-: There are 525 million smallholder farmers in the world.
These farmers produce 70% of the world's food
and yet are among the poorest people on the planet.
Jiva is a profit-for-purpose venture that BCG X launched
in collaboration with Olam,
one of the world's leading agribusinesses.
Jiva's purpose is to uplift the livelihoods
of these farmers by providing them access to inputs, credit.
We're providing them a market for their outputs
and by giving them good advice to improve their yields.
-: Olam is a global supply chain manager
of agricultural commodities.
It operates in more than 60 countries and
it has 70,000 employees. We had a very clear vision
that Jiva should impact positively
these smallholder farmers' lives.
BCG X was involved right
from day one of conceptualizing this idea with Olam.
-: We started with in-field interviews with farmers
from India, Indonesia, Africa
to really understand their pain points.
And this uncovered pain points
such as access to credit, lack of knowledge,
access to markets, price transparency and so forth.
-: BCG X helped us conduct the research
and subsequently helped us validate
and build the hypothesis for the business,
and subsequently commercialize the business.
They helped us build the technology platform,
which is what Jiva's current tech platform is built on.
They also helped through crafting the strategy
and also the go-to-market approach
for this business.
To put it all together,
they were able to help us recruit the team,
which forms even today the core of the leadership team
of Jiva and since has been able to build an organization
of about 500 people today.
-: Once we are convinced
that this is an idea that we could invest in, BCG helped us
in building this into a prototype and a working model
by bringing together a team of designers, technologists,
product specialists, venture architects,
and an overall GM to run this program
to take it to a stage
where Olam could then employ dedicated people
to take over from BCG X.
-: We've been able to substantially scale the business
since we launched the product in March of 2021.
In the last year, we transacted with close to 12,000 farmers
and this year, we've been able to scale that to close
to 70,000 farmers.
And that has translated to a business revenue
of growing from $17 million to about $75 million this year.
We've also made an impact in terms of incomes
to these farmers.
Their incomes have increased by almost 25%.
Farmers who followed our advisory
through our digital AI-backed platform
have improved their incomes by almost 50%.
-: Jiva has made a phenomenal start.
In its first market of South Sulawesi [Indonesia],
it has reached over 60,000 farmers
and market shares of 30% in some of their target areas.
They are now in scale-up
and have launched a pilot program in India,
which gives them access
to 140 million farmers who can benefit
from their services.
Looking back, BCG X has helped create a real-world solution
that can have global impact.
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