Towards a common, multi-channel PAD platform

In 2019 we launched PADDY, an in-house, PAD-wide technology stack. The platform offers us a range of advantages as we build and iterate our services, and expand our reach. PADDY already underpins our work in Kenya, servicing hundreds of thousands of farmers, and is being piloted across components of service in India.

Named at the intersection of consciously poor puns that connect a diminutive for ‘Patrick’, our organizational acronym, and the word most commonly used to describe rice in South Asia, PADDY's existing and implicit capabilities offer us exciting new service delivery and learning opportunities as well as operational and efficiency gains.

During PAD’s initial organizational development, we primarily implemented our digital services through third-party technology providers. Off-the-shelf dissemination technologies were justified as we focused our work on content development and product design. Notwithstanding growing administrative and cost implications, a siloed approach to technology became increasingly unwieldy as our initiatives became more sophisticated and reached scale, and as we moved into new geographies.

Having more control of our tech gives us greater flexibility, drives operational efficiency gains across geographies, is more cost-effective as we set up and scale new initiatives, and facilitates more opportunities for system comparisons and organization-wide learning. Naturally, having a technology platform in-house reduces our dependence on third party solutions and reduces our exposure to associated service disruptions and complications beyond our control.

Customizable, portable and expandable

PADDY, PAD’s in-house technology platform, offers a set of reusable modules for building two-way Short Message Service (SMS) and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. Critical to PAD’s work across geographies and digital cultures, and with a multitude of implementation partners, PADDY's platform is easily customized.

PADDY can be connected to, and accommodate, a range of back-end systems including Twilio, Africa’s Talking, Infobip, and FreeSWITCH. Importantly, PADDY can port to digital messaging and voice over IP systems such as WhatsApp and Telegram which, in particular geographies, are more intensively used than SMS and traditional voice messaging systems.

Unlike some off-the-shelf alternatives, a key advantage of PADDY is that it is flexible and easily extendible. The platform is capable of cohering multiple communications channels into one system (e.g. IVR + SMS) and can interact with a range of external data sources and Application Program Interfaces (APIs).

We are also excited about the platform's adaptability and ability to incorporate emerging technologies. For example, as Google's speech-to-text capabilities advance - particularly with regard to languages from the Indian subcontinent - PADDY is demonstrating promise for allowing some level of voice navigation in our IVR systems. As we iterate and learn, and adapt to further improvements in Google's tooling, we may be able to make our tools more accessible to less literate farmers.

A platform for learning

True to PAD’s commitment to relentlessly question and experiment to improve service delivery, drive innovation and optimize impact, PADDY is built for experimentation.

The platform facilitates survey programming with integrated randomization primitives. Experiments can be easily customized, and the backend is structured to promote rigor and ease of analysis with real-time monitoring of system performance and data collection.