Call For Expression Of Interest (EOI) To Develop Mobile Software Application For Field Monitoring

Background

Global Seeds produces its seed through contracting of farmers including smallholder farmers who access seed and other inputs on loan. The loan is paid back to the farmers at the point when the seed is being sold to the company. Farmers produce seed with expert help from Global Seeds field technicians who regularly visit the farmers to inspect the farms and train the farmers on various aspects of the crop production cycle. Field technicians normally produce written reports to submit to management for activities conducted e.g. trainings made, farmers visited and crop protection chemicals being used by the farmers. Real time feedback of these activities is normally sent through pictures on email and /or phone messaging applications such as WhatsApp.

A field technician needs to have accurate information regarding each of the farmers under their management and the details of the farmers captured would include but not limited to: Name of the farmers, Gender, Age, Land holding size, crop grown, previous crop grown (or land history) amount and value of inputs accessed by the farmers. Further the technician needs to report the same to management with an actual log of the dates that each farmer planted, the dates that the farmers access inputs and when they received various trainings among other activities.

Global Seeds Management further needs verification that indeed farmers are being trained, fields are being inspected and that there is a quick and efficient mechanism for sending feedback to the field technicians on work plans and other technical backstopping as needed.

Traceability: When a farmer has been registered as a grower for Global Seeds he/she is allocated an identification number known as a Lot Number. The lot number represents the farmer’s field and all that will be harvested from it. When a farmer has sold his produce to Global Seeds the produce is then processed and packed ready for the market. Each packet containing the produce from one farmer will bear the same Lot number and this allows that any customer complaints regarding the packet can be traced back to the same farmers. In increasing traceability of its products Global Seeds seeks that the lot number can further be linked to a barcode that when scanned can easily pull up an entire file of the farmer that was contracted to grow the contents of the pack bearing that barcode thereby improving turnaround time for responding to customer complaints and pulling out faulty batches of seed. The scanning and tracing is intended to be strictly internal for Global Seeds as a quality control measure and not necessarily for Customer use.

Scope of Work

Global Seeds seeks the services of a company to develop and deploy a mobile device based software application that can solve the described operations where by front line staff are able to carry the software in their mobile device and also that the software has a web portal that management can access to monitor and verify the work as being done by the front line staff. Among others but not limited to, the software application must have the following capabilities

1. Log farming activities through
2. Geotag farm fields and activity venues including pictures
3. Digitally sign participants that attend an activity e.g. Fields days, training
4. Record farm and farmer data
5. To Geotag all farmer fields with relevant information on Farm size, Previous crop, type of soil, Farmer gender,
6. All to calculate area of farm fields
7. Monitor and Log data on Motorbike mileage and fuel use
8. To tackle the challenge seed source traceability, the App should be able trace back to the respective smallholder farmer that produced the seed. (batch number, Barcodes)
9. The application should allow to capture field’s polygons of each smallholder directly onsite without any required experience in geodata processing and programming. Field outlines and other collected data (e.g., geotagged photos, management practices, social and economic information) can subsequently be uploaded to a secure database.
10. The application should be able to do simple analysis, and visualization of smallholder farmer’s data.
11. Enable to trace back raw materials to smallholder field level
12. Able to make yield projects with minimal error.

Global Seeds invites companies to send in their Expression of Interest for development and maintaining of such a software application. The Expression of Interest must be addressed to: The Projects manager, Global Seeds Ltd, P. O Box 1505, Lilongwe, and Malawi. Mode of sending EOI is by Email only to: info@globalseedsmw.com

Applicants are required to send their offer together with a company profile detailing similar work, a business registration certificate, the time lines required to develop such an application, a breakdown and schedule of costs related to carrying out the work and the time period required to complete the assignment and Minimum specifications of the gadget to run the application .

All EOIs to be received no later than 22nd March 2021, 1300 Central African Time. Closing date for receiving all queries and seeking for clarification will be 8th March 2021 and all queries shall be responded to by 12th April 2021.
Only Shortlisted companies will be contacted on 25th March 2021 to set up online virtual pitching meetings.

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