Lahore (Muhammad Yasir) Telenor Pakistan, one of the country’s foremost telecom and digital services providers, and Inbox Business Technologies, a leading provider of technologies ensuring business agility in the digital age, continue to collaboratively lead the way in digitizing the agriculture sector of Punjab. The two organizations, working to achieve a shared mission of digital inclusion in Pakistan, joined hands to launch the Connected Agriculture Platform Punjab (CAPP) in December 2017, as part of the government of Punjab’s ‘Empowerment of Kissan through Digital & Financial Inclusion’ initiative.
Under CAPP, a set of digital applications were launched in Urdu, Punjabi & Saraiki including CAPP Registration, Zarrai Mushwara, Zarrai Jantri, Mukaami Mosam and Kisaan TV. While additional applications such as Crop Calculator, Subsidy, Farm Supplies, and Mandi applications are under development and will be rolled out in coming months.
As part of the CAPP programme, 110,000 plus eligible farmers will get 3G/4G enabled smartphones along with free SIMS and data bundles in the first phase. Furthermore, Telenor and Inbox are jointly developing several of the critical applications and have established 72 fixed & mobile facilitation centers and booths in 36 districts of Punjab to train and facilitate the farmers on application usage, as well as a call center to support farmers along with an ongoing ‘Most Connected Farmer (MCF)’ program to encourage farmers on how to maximize benefits from the digital platform. CAPP’s results so far have been very encouraging. In the first two months alone, farmers have held over half a million sessions on the app with an average session length of over 40 minutes. Almost 20,000 farmers have registered on CAPP with over 200 more joining daily.
