executive summary

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Overview User-driven websites have proven to be the best way of mass creating content and there is no better way to do this than to create a sustainable system that provides value and wealth to its users. Project Intanet aims to create massive local content by creating a localized community-driven learning and ecommerce platform.

The Goal The Goal of Project Intanet is to create a platform which serves as an ecommerce and resource center to farmers and a cheap/fresh buy center to normal users. Project Intanet would enable farmers to learn how to boost income, gain access to micro-credit and investor support, sell their products online, obtain first-hand market information, as well as have direct access to their end-consumers. This will also go a long way in creating proper market balance. After creating their profiles, farmers will obtain access to investors who can supply them with equipment, funds, seeds, fingerlings, etc. for a small revenue share in return. Project Intanet will also enable local entrepreneurs to register as affiliates. The job of these entrepreneurs will be to assist local small-scale or individual farmers to bring their products to the web. These entrepreneurs can create farmer-hubs and collect a small percentage for products sold through their hubs. Users will be able to participate in local forums, exchange messages, view individual stores or hubs, farmer profiles and learning resources.

Target The first and primary target of Intanet are small & medium-scale farmers in Nigeria. According to our survey, majority of farmers in Nigeria face a critical lack of access to information on how to obtain micro-credit, pest/disease control, crop processing & storage technologies and market information; all of which can culminate up to 400% boost in crop productivity and income.

ITU Connection In line with ITU’s goal, Project Intanet is a simple project that can be reproduced in anywhere in the world where there are farmers and available telecommunications network. User-driven content has always proven to be the best way of creating mass content and there is no better way to do this than to create a sustainable system that provides value and wealth to its users.

Methodology The lifeblood of Project Intanet is her users and getting and keeping users on our platform is requires tact. We have three main type of users: farmers (A-type), casual users (B-type) and business users (Ctype). We have two main strategies to bring our users to our platform.

Local Entrepreneurs as Farmer mobilizers For any store owner, the easier it is to find anything you want in a store, the more products you are able to sell. Our strategy is to engage local entrepreneurs to create stores and help rural farmers put their products on their stores. A visitor can see the farmers whose product are on a particular store and the entrepreneurs can also help link them up with investors. The general idea of this process is to create a natural process of internet adoption. As more rural farmers begin to get investors and sell more goods, the urge to learn how to use the Internet and communicate more directly with end consumers just like the literate small and middle-scale farmers.

Spend less for more For casual and business users, our strategy is to provide an easy expense calculator for users, so for instance, if a user normally buys 4 onions, 8 yams, and 20 cups of beans in a month, they can input how much they normally spend on this and easily see how much they can gain. As an added advantage, they buy fresh products without having to go to distant markets. Our ecommerce system will enable them to get any goods they order delivered to them at the comfort of their home. This is easy because many people who work as commercial drivers usually have to come all the way up to the town without any passengers. With this system, job opportunities are not just created for them but they help create a more powerful system. Users will also be encouraged to bring rural dwellers in their villages to the site and from time to time will be asked to help provide learning content for the users they invited. In addition to these, we will be also tactically advancing the Project keeping the inclusion philosophy in mind. For this purpose we have the Fun and the Adoption Cycle

The Adoption Cycle At the core of Project Intanet is a smartly designed psychological system which aims to include every user who can only speak local languages. We have envisioned an inclusion system which will target semi-elite users, casual users, elite users, business users, and non-elite users respectively. In regions like the south-east of Nigeria, the local languages are less known by users in the city and in line with this, we will create a fun system that brings more focus and attention to those who can still remember.

Semielite class

Casual users

Business users

Elite class

Non-elite class

The Fun In order to keep the community site exciting, we’ll be challenging our users to see how much they remember of their local cultures, languages, traditions etc. From time to time, we will post pictures and also encourage users to also do so of old or ancient items and ask users to guess what they are. This will

go a long way in engaging more casual users to engage and contribute on the site. There will also be a penalty for users who break the rules by speaking foreign languages and point for each post users make that doesn’t contain foreign languages.

Project Impact Project can benefit every community in numerous ways. While there are many possible ways Project Intanet can impact an environment, we have identified the following key impacts: -

Enable farmers to gain access to investors Reduce market inequality Increase the availability of digitized local content Encourage learning and growth of local languages Increase abundance of food and local products Increase income for farmers and traders Increase income for commercial drivers in urban slums

Opportunities According to our survey, the Nigerian government is currently looking towards several ways of boosting the agricultural sector. Also, in Feb. 2014, The Minister of Communications Technology, Mrs. Omobola Johnson revealed the government's willingness to promote local content. Currently also, the government has created an initiative that helps female farmers to obtain access to loans and microcredit without the need for collateral. Awareness of these information currently is still very poor. In addition, there are growing number of investors looking to invest in the agricultural sectors, but lack access to farm land. Our system enables them to see the success rates of farmers by checking the rating of the products sold by them as well as the rate at which their product sales increase. This will enable investors make a better choice on how to invest their money as well as help provide farmers with capital.

Challenges and Risks Any big project usually has a lot of risk attached to it or it’s not feasible at all. While Project Intanet technology is considerably low cost, there are factors that could lead to poor user adoption and system inefficiency. These include: -

Availability of Internet Access Speed of website and mobile app Availability of local entrepreneurs Site usability

We have accounted for these challenges in different ways. We chose semi-elite users as our first target because these are those who already know a little bit of how to use their phones to surf the Internet as

well as have some little knowledge of modern farming techniques but may not have access to enough readable content as well as capital. As for speed and site usability, we have years of experience in professional website development and usability testing and this should hardly be a problem.

Open Source Translation System Project Intanet will host an open-source platform to enable users and developers contribute to the Intanet translation system. The language data will be stored in XML and we’ll host the system plus API for free on our website.

Business Model To ensure the sustainability and life of this project, we also have key ways of obtaining returns for the value we provide.

Revenue Streams The major revenue source of Project Intanet is the ecommerce platform. Through the ecommerce platform, project Intanet can earn revenue through purchase of ad credits, premium store subscriptions and sales commissions.

Ad credits

•The ecommerce platform will enable store owners to advertise their goods on the homepage for a running fee

Premium Stores

•A free store can only add a limited number of products, to add/sell more products, store owners can upgrade their membership. This will also reduce sales commissions for large stores

Sales Commissions

•Once a store exceeds a specific amount sales/day, they will be charged a very small percentage per product/sale made based on their subscription types

Key Partners Our major key partners will be organizations that support the learning and development of local languages as well as organizations which support farmers and increase of food production. The following are some of the organizations that may play a key roles as partners.

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Otu Subakwa Igbo: Otu Subakwa Igbo is an organization that promotes the Igbo Language which is the major language of South-East Nigeria by organizing conferences, competitions and producing movies in the local language. These can help us to get casual users and supporters and bring fun to the platform.

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Information Technology Industry Association of Nigeria: According to ITAN President, Florence Seriki, ITAN is worried by the low adoption rate of local content in Nigeria’s Information Technology space and in collaboration with the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), is seeking new ways to improve local content patronage for indigenous players.

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National Information Technology Development Agency: According to the Director General of NITDA, NITDA will employ a multi-stakeholder engagement to dealing with all industry issues, especially on local content development to ensure that the growth of the indigenous IT sector.

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Centre for Yoruba Language Engineering: The Centre for Yoruba Language Engineering consists of a group of professors who hope to encourage, promote, modernize and help anyone learn the Yoruba language for use in even specialized domains such as technology, science, medicine, engineering, agriculture, law and politics, administration, etc.