Agri-business for Trade Competitiveness Project (ATC-P) branded as Katalyst is a market development project implemented by Swisscontact and operates under the umbrella of the Ministry of Commerce. Since its inception, the project has worked with various private companies to design and implement interventions aimed at bringing about sustainable changes to the market. Katalyst is co-funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), the UK Government, and the Danish International Development Agency (Danida).
In 2015, Katalyst collaborated with a number of agro-input companies to develop an ICT based service that was aimed to provide timely and accurate agriculture information to farmers. The service requires farmers, retailers and any others seeking agriculture information to place a missed call using to a hotline number, which is then followed by a “call back” from the agro-input company’s call center agent.
The agro-input company does this by using customer- management software which registers the missed call and has an IP phone-based dialer. In order to develop this service, Katalyst has also created linkages between input companies and software developers.
Katalyst, in association with Bangladesh Crop Protection Association (BCPA), arranged a knowledge sharing workshop on ‘Developing an ICT based customer care service for farmers’ on 19 November 2017 at Six Seasons Hotel, Dhaka. The objective of this workshop was to share the experiences and learning of developing this ICT based service among relevant industry players in order to sensitize and encourage them to develop similar services for farmers in the future.
The workshop was attended by representatives of BCPA and various other leading private sector companies, software developers, and media.
