Busara Center for Behavioral Economics

Proposal

Vanilla Value Chain: Scaling Smallholder Service Delivery – Tanzania

This proposal has been created by Busara Center for Behavioral Economics

SECTION 1: BACKGROUND

Project name: Vanilla Value Chain: Scaling Smallholder Service Delivery – Tanzania

Name of submitting organization: Busara Center for Behavioral Economics

Proposed skill contributions:

• • Stakeholder Mapping and Stakeholder/Community Consultation
  • Community Capacity Building
  • Outgrower Support and Engagement
  • Monitoring and Evaluation

Background: 

Who we are

Busara Center for Behavioral Economics (Busara) is an advisory and research organization focused on advancing and applying behavioral science in the Global South. We work with organizations to build behaviorally-informed solutions to

help scale their products, programs, and policies. We work to understand the context of decision-making in new markets, with a strong focus in Sub-Saharan Africa. We operate from our permanent offices in Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania, and

work on projects with partners across the continent.

Our mission

Busara’s mission is to work with researchers and organizations to advance and apply behavioral science in pursuit of poverty alleviation.

Our vision

Behavioral science is a highly interdisciplinary field that draws on methods and insights from psychology, anthropology, economics, data science and more. Our team combines academic rigor with strong private sector experience to build evidence-driven yet pragmatic analyses and solutions. Our 40+ engagement teams are decidedly global to ensure our interventions are leveraging cutting edge behavioral science but also grounded in the context and cultures we work in. Our staff comes to Busara with a diverse set of expertise in health, education, economics, political science, finance, gender, development studies, behavioral science, mathematics, environmental studies, anthropology, and nutrition. Our vision is to build behaviorally-informed solutions to help our partners avoid risks, save money, and drive impact. We believe in the importance of behavioral science because while people may feel they have clear intentions, their actions do not always reflect these goals. Behavioral science focuses on understanding these inconsistencies and building models that are more reflective of the human experience.

What we do

Behavioral economics, though recently popularized, is still a relatively nascent field. Busara is committed to advancing behavioral science in emerging markets, and focuses on three primary barriers to overcome: data, capacity, systems. Our work always starts with removing assumptions and pre-conceived notions about culture and context to look at the world through a fresh perspective. We spend a long time listening, learning, designing and discarding potential solutions before we find the ones that may work.

Then we test, scale, break, and iterate, again and again until we have it right. Our challenge is that survey data largely focuses on attitudes, preferences, and beliefs, but rarely actions. New data collection methods and measurement tools are needed. At Busara, we build new data collection tools through incentivized games and vignettes in lab simulations or through embedded tools in ongoing operations:

• Decision labs: Standing, mobile, and embedded labs are available to accommodate projects of all sizes and scope. We currently have deployed labs in 5 countries: Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, India and Tanzania.
• Decision data panels: We use an inhouse tool that leverages phone sensors and experience sampling to aggregate behavioral patterns.
• Passive sensing: We utilize mobile phone remote sensing to provide objective, granular data on user digital behaviors to try to understand behavioral trends and patterns.
• Active sensing: Wearable and environmental sensors detect events in a physical location and provide continuous data to support  environmental design and provide broader metrics.

We develop software, data panels, and models that can be built into existing systems to enable continuous testing and application of behavioral interventions. We build predictive models that help organizations to both predict when certain behaviors will happen, as well as make decisions to intervene and prescribe solutions when triggered. Another key service at Busara is that we not only help organizations solve problems, but we also cultivate behavioral expertise within our partners to build a more behaviorallyinformed market. We do so through workshops and executive education. We offer staff training and capacity building to support organizations in developing in-house capacity to maximum comprehension, implementation speed, and data quality. For examples of projects we worked on, please refer to our case studies on our website:

https://work.busaracenter.org/case-studies.php

SECTION 2: PROJECT APPROACH

SECTION 3: ACTIVITIES AND DELIVERIES

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SECTION 4: SKILLS AND TEAM

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SECTION 5: FEES, REPORTING AND FOLLOW ON

Currency Selection: USD
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SECTION 6: ADDITIONAL FILES

CVs

Workplan and budget

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