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Rikin gandhi digital green
Rikin Gandhi is focusing on the efficiency of information dissemination and application and creating new knowledge networks for agriculture extension services.
Rikin Gandhi is the CEO and co-founder of Digital Green.

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Transforming Ag Extensions in India: A Moment with Rikin Gandhi of Digital Green

Transcript of: Transforming Ag Extensions in India:A Moment with Rikin Gandhi of Digital Green

Rikin Gandhi: Growing up I was inspired by astronauts and I wanted to put together my own astronaut playbook by studying computer science, aerospace engineering, getting a pilot license and was about to enlist in the US Air Force when I said college friends who are starting up a venture out in India and that’s what brought me out to India to work with farmers for the first time.

Alan Olsen: When you started with the venture had you already gone through school?

Rikin Gandhi: Yes, I studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and aerospace engineering at MIT and was working actually here in the Bay Area at Oracle when I had these friends starting up this venture with farmers in India.

Alan Olsen: Coming out with an aerospace degree out of MIT is no small feat but to do about face and to say well yeah here I have an aerospace degree but my passion is

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6,000 Videos by Smallholder Farmers with Rikin Gandhi of Digital Green

March 2, 2021rowena

Aid, Evolved

6,000 Videos by Smallholder Farmers with Rikin Gandhi of Digital Green

Rikin Gandhi reverse-emigrated to India to join a bio-diesel startup – which went under the week that he landed in the country. After that, he cold-emailed Microsoft Research to get a job. Three years later, he took the findings from his research to start a non-profit named Digital Green. Today, Digital Green is a leading organization which empowers smallholder farmers to lift themselves out of poverty by harnessing the collective power of technology and grassroots-level partnerships. To date, it has reached over 2.3 million farmers in 18 countries across South Asia and Africa. It is known for popularizing an innovative, bottom-up approach for farmers to record and share their own videos and agricultural best practices.

In our conversation, Rikin walks us through the ups and downs of his tumultuous journey in setting up a non-profit. He shares how they managed with zero c

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Rikin Gandhi co-founded and is the executive director of Digital Green, a global development organization that empowers smallholder farmers to lift themselves out of poverty by harnessing the collective power of digital technology and grassroots-level partnerships. Rikin began his career at Oracle, where he received patents for designing linguistic search algorithms. Later, he joined Microsoft Research’s Technology for Emerging Markets team in India, where he researched ways to amplify the effectiveness of agricultural development globally. There, he created Digital Green to use peer-to-peer farming videos to increase the efficiency of agricultural extension services. Digital Green is now building FarmStack as an open platform to enable the 2 million smallholder farmers across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia that it works with to control and share their own data with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, DFID, Walmart Foundation, and others. Rikin also co-founded