Willingness to pay for information.
Our first project is a study, not a product. Before anyone prices rural information services, someone has to ask what ecosystem players already spend on information — and what they would pay for information they can actually act on.
Everyone agrees information has value. Nobody knows what it’s worth.
Rural advisory, price data, climate information and market intelligence are almost always given away — funded by donors, bundled into a sale, or absorbed as a cost of doing business. That makes the sector hard to sustain, because nobody has established what any of it is actually worth to the people using it.
This study asks a narrow, answerable question: what are rural ecosystem players — farmers, cooperatives, agro-dealers, buyers, lenders, insurers and service providers — already paying for information, and what would they pay for information they trust enough to act on?
We are running it first, before building anything, because the answer sets the terms for everything that follows: what we build, who pays for it, and whether the model can stand on its own.
Three movements of the study.
- A.
Segment the ecosystem
Map who actually consumes rural information and in what form — farmers, cooperatives, agro-dealers, buyers, lenders, insurers and extension providers each value it differently.
- B.
Measure stated and revealed demand
Pair what people say they would pay with what they already spend — on airtime, subscriptions, agents, advisers and the cost of deciding without good information.
- C.
Publish the evidence
An open study the sector can price against, and the demand model that informs how our own services are designed and funded.