The Digitizing Agricultural Payments publication, jointly published by CGAP and the United Nations Capital Development Fund, highlights how The United Nations Mobile Money for the Poor (MM4P) and Kyagalanyi Coffee Limited (KCL) created a system to digitize payments to KCL’s 6,000 certified farmers, in Uganda. In addition to addressing the complex dynamics of digitizing agricultural value chains, the paper illustrates how seven organizations from different sectors embarked on a three-year journey to digitize Uganda’s coffee value chain. The solutions they built and lessons they learned have fueled the digitization of several other agricultural value chains in Uganda—particularly, tea, dairy, and maize.
Although they haven’t fully reached all 2.8 million of their coffee farmers, the lessons learned from this project urged MM4P, MTN, and other mobile network operators to invest in digitizing multiple agriculture value chains in the country, which, in turn, has led to financial inclusion for numerous rural, low-income populations.
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The Strengthening African Rural Smallholders (STARS) program, a five year initiative of ICCO Cooperation and in partnership with The Mastercard Foundation, aims to transform the lives of 210,000 farmers, 50% of them are women, in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Senegal and will have an overall impact in the lives of over 1 million people.
To inform their work ICCO recently published a Credit Pilot Deep Dive (CPDD) which investigates differences in the uptake and impact of newly developed agricultural credit products on smallholder farmers in Ethiopia. Using a mixed quantitative and qualitative approach, based on household survey triangulated with focus group discussions (FSG), this study aims to provide the STARS program, and participating MFIs, an enhanced understanding of their client base.
More specifically, the Ethiopia CPDD study provides a deeper understanding of the 75,000 (50% women) smallholder farmers, and their households, in the STARS Ethiopia program This CPDD study focused on two main zones and credit products in Ethiopia: vegetable loans in the Meki-Ziway area and malt barley loans in...
The Strengthening African Rural Smallholders (STARS) program, a five year initiative of ICCO Cooperation and in partnership with The Mastercard Foundation, aims to transform the lives of 210,000 farmers, 50% of them are women, in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Senegal and will have an overall impact in the lives of over 1 million people. To inform their work ICCO recently published a Credit Pilot Deep Dive (CPDD) which investigates differences in the uptake and impact of newly developed agricultural credit products on smallholder farmers in Rwanda. Using a mixed quantitative and qualitative approach, based on household survey triangulated with focus group discussions (FSG), this study aims to provide the STARS program, and participating MFIs, an enhanced understanding of their client base.
More specifically, the Rwanda CPDD study provides a deeper understanding of the 44,000 (50% women) smallholder farmers, and their households, in the STARS Rwanda program. This CPDD study focuses on two main credit products in Rwanda: banana loans in the Southern Province and Irish potato loans in the Northern Province. The participating farmers have been...
