IT’S ALL IN THE DESIGN: SOIL HEALTH CARDS IN INDIA

What happens when researchers start learning all about marketing?

This episode features IFPRI Program Manager Vartika Singh who, in a conversation with Sivan Yosef, tells the story of how IFPRI researchers in India set out to investigate whether government-issued soil health cards were effective in getting smallholders to improve their farming practices. Instead, the researchers discovered an entirely different challenge: farmers couldn’t understand the cards. Working with a visual designer, IFPRI and its partners embarked on a process usually reserved for the marketing sector: helping make a product easy to understand and use.

The story holds numerous lessons on how to make research more accessible to a wide audience.