For the past four years, UNCDF has been stimulating private sector engagement in rural areas of Uganda through digital bulk payment projects across five agricultural value chains: coffee, dairy, maize, seed oil and tea.

In-depth research and active collaboration with stakeholders in these value chains have yielded important insights about the financial behaviours and preferences of smallholder farmers, the challenges that agribusinesses face, and the lessons learned and recommendations that emerged from implementing digitized bulk payment solutions:

To capture experiences and lessons for the wider industry, this publication aims to share findings distilled from the experiences of UNCDF in each of the five selected agricultural value chains. In addition to lessons learned, this paper highlights the digitization challenges faced by smallholder farmers, private sector companies and providers of digital financial services (DFS) in addition to recommendations going forward.