Telenor – Digital mAgri Solution
Telenor Pakistan is a Pakistani mobile data and digital services provider, owned by Norwegian company Telenor Group. Currently, Telenor Pakistan has a total subscriber base of 45 million with 28% cellular market share in Pakistan and more than 1,900 employees.
Telenor Pakistan covers more than 80% of Pakistan’s population in urban and rural areas with a network of over 11,000 cell sites of which 80% are 3G and 70% are 4G enabled.
The Challenge:
In 2015 growth in urban mobile penetration was tapering off. However, rural penetration still had a lot of potential. Telenor decided that they would develop a bouquet of specialized value-add-services (VAS) that would cater to the specific needs of Pakistan’s rural communities and we were approached to build this platform for them.
The Solution:
Initially we were tasked with building a robust platform,
named Telenor Khush’haal Zamindar, that would enable the delivery of agriculture and rural community related content to a massive user base. Users that only have basic mobile phones. Further, these were largely illiterate users – that couldn’t read or write in their native language – let alone English.
Our solution was a content delivery platform that manages the distribution of content, primarily, over voice (i.e., interactive voice response (IVR) and outbound dialing (OBD) – aka robocall) channels. This we did and the platform went live in 2016.
The platform would consist of a group of ‘core-services’ that would be provided free-of-cost to Telenor subscribers and a series of ‘paid-wall’ services that would provide these users with additional value (such as insurance and healthcare related services etc.) at a minimal cost.
Today, the service is the largest of its kind in the world and has over 12 million subscribers from across Pakistan.
In 2019 we were given the additional responsibility for managing and producing content for the core platform and a paid-wall service hosted on the platform – Khush’haal Radio. Today we produce 33 agricultural advisories every day in six different languages and dialects. In addition, we produce three daily news updates, a daily current affairs program and several weekly entertainment and education related programs on an ongoing basis.