According to the Agri-Fin Mobile 2018 Conference that was held at the end of August 2018 in Harare, Zimbabwe titled “Digital Innovation: Connecting Youth to Opportunities in Agriculture,” it was highlighted that tens of thousands of smallholder farmers in the three different countries of implementation – have increased their earnings thanks to private service providers taking part in this project.
The project implemented by Mercy Corps worked with local partners in the three countries to build sustainable business models that seek to benefit local communities and associated businesses.
The SDC realised the enormous potential in innovative opportunities provided by mobile phones which have an increased penetration rate in Africa and how they could benefit marginalized people in developing countries.
Through the Agri-Fin Mobile project, Mercy Corps was able to bring together phone companies, insurance companies, banks and information service providers to launch new services for farmers: bank accounts, digital payment options, loans, insurance for and information about producing and marketing agricultural products – all of which can be accessed on a mobile phone regardless of the time or one’s location.
As a result of the project, smallholder farmers were better able to market their products – faster and cheaper than before. Inevitably, the project not only provided a new era for tens of thousands of farmers who still live more than a day’s journey away from the nearest bank.
As at August 2018, around 1,400,000 farmers had benefited from digital banking against a target of 280,000 making life easier for a number of smallholder farmers – by providing simpler access to loans through mobile phones.
The viability of the Agri-Fin Mobile business models hinged on the involvement of a number of private-sector actors. In each of the three project countries, the SDC and Mercy Corps acted as initiator to ensure that collaborations could become sustainable.
For smallholder maize farmers in Indonesia for example, the benefits of the project were quickly achieved through a loan facility of 10 million rupee (about CHF 730) per hectare of cropland coupled with farm advisory services and loss-of-earnings insurance in the event of drought or a devastating cyclone.
In Zimbabwe, Mercy Corps worked closely with mobile phone operator, Econet Wireless to launch a digital platform providing targeted weather forecasts and farming advice. Farmers were able to access agricultural related information using a code on their mobiles.
The project also introduced a packet of services costing one US dollar a month for farmers to access weather based insurance, loans and marketing tips.
The conference in Zimbabwe concluded that the project was able to maximize the impact of activities with limited resources in the targeted three countries.
In addition, the conference tackled the future of the project and how young people both as beneficiaries and as creators of new types of services for rural communities can utilize the experience generated from the AgriFin Mobile project with the main objective of reducing the rural-urban migration in most developing countries.
