How Digital Finance is Transforming Agriculture

06th April 2016
by secretary

Paepard

6 April 2016. This report offers new and interesting insights on the role that digital finance can play in providing a more cost-effective and secure method for financial transactions in the agricultural sector, particularly for rural smallholder farms.

In doing so, it offers a three-step approach for replacing cash payments being made by large buyers (e.g. lead firms, cooperatives) to smallholder farmers, with mobile payments:

Cash usage behavioural research (CUBeR)
Strategic alliance formation (StAF)
Embedding mobile finance (EMoFi) into the value chain knowledge exchange and other interventions.

Complementing these recommendations, the initiatives profiled in this report offer compelling cases of how three different organisations approached the agri-digital finance opportunity and the solutions they crafted to successfully reach smallholder farmers:

smartMoney in Uganda
nwK agri-services in Zambia
rice mobile finance (riMFin) in Ghana

Increasing access to agri-digital finance not only creates new market opportunities for business, but also provides a vital service to smallholder farmers. This report highlights how digital finance can bring more financial service options to the smallholder farmers, thus providing rural farmers with increased access to finance and enhanced opportunities for value creation.

Source: PAEPARD FEED