16^th October 2018, Kampala, Uganda: For the past four years, UNCDF has been working with the private sector in rural areas of Uganda to digitize payments in agricultural value chains.

Digitizing payments and increasing the usage of mobile money in agricultural value chains offers a compelling opportunity to improve financial inclusion and create efficiencies for agribusinesses and smallholder farmers.

Focusing on coffee, dairy, maize, seed oil and tea, UNCDF worked to financially include the ninety percent of Ugandan smallholder farmers who do not have a bank account in their name.

The in-depth research and active collaboration with the private sector across the five value chains have yielded important insights about the financial behavior and preferences of smallholder farmers.

“We have been able to identify the challenges that agricultural businesses face, and collected learnings from the implementation of digital bulk payments” Richard Ndahiro, Value Chain and Digital Finance Expert at UNCDF in Uganda.

Risk of cash theft, loss of work time and lack of transparency are among the issues identified for agricultural and private sector businesses. Limited infrastructure, network expansion and liquidity constraints are some of the issues revealed by the research and ground work of UNCDF with the financial service providers.

Together with the private sector and smallholder farmers, UNCDF worked to find solutions to each issue and improve access and usage of mobile money payments. As Yo Uganda! put it - one of UNCDF’s partners in coffee and seed oil - the solutions implemented required for the partner to be “ready to deploy a dedicated team on-the-ground called a booster team to increase top of mind awareness about basic digital financial services”. In coffee alone, beyond Yo Uganda, UNCDF partnered with another five private companies to reach out to small holder farmers. One of the result was the registration of close to 28,000 mobile money customers and the digital payments of some 3,600 smallholder farmers. And the results do not stop here, thanks to the partnership with MTN over 100,000 people are now connected to a permanent network tower in Kapchorwa, Uganda.

Eric Nana, Managing Director at Mobipay, says “working in maize was the entry point that helped foster relationships with farmer organizations. At Mobipay we are used to working with community leaders to raise awareness about the benefits of digital financial services, this is what accelerated the use of the mobile wallet services by farmers.”

UNCDF, with FSD Uganda and DFID, is organizing a learning event for stakeholders in the agriculture value chain to share the learnings and experience accumulated by UNCDF in Uganda between 2015 and 2018.

Discover the full report here and please join us for more information and the opportunity to talk to all our partners on:

Tuesday 16 October 2018, Golden Tulip Hotel Kampala, 08:30 AM to 01:00 PM​.