Schedule and costs

• The total cost of implementing DSP in a country consists of the one-time costs for the  rollout activities plus the ongoing costs to keep the platform operational.  At the same time, optional features such as SMS broadcasting require additional costs to cover the delivery charges from the telecommunication’s provider.
  

• The optional IVR services also require additional fixed costs to cover configuration efforts during the rollout as well as ongoing costs to cover the delivery charges from the telecommunication’s provider.  These latter costs vary depending on country.
  

• DSP supports the delivery of SMS messages that are directly integrated with local Telecom providers, which reduces the cost of broadcasting. The integration effort can be performed in-house by FAO Division of Digitalization and Informatics, by the project team or an external provider.

• Costs of the rollout will depend on the planned activities and timelines established together with local partners. Activities will differ across rollouts but will generally cover the following:  inception workshops with stakeholders, content creation/validation and training workshops, and outreach materials.
  

• Operational costs include those currently absorbed by FAO to manage the core DSP platform. These costs may be charged back to business units in the future based on costs and/or business model of the DSP rollout.
  

• As a reference, ~$55,000 is the estimated cost for a rollout over a period of 6 months as per the most recent DSP rollout. This included: 1) configuration of four default themes covering ten crops; 2) NPP coordinator; 3) inception, training, and content creation workshops; 4) rollout events in the pilot districts; 5) communication campaign.