Tag: Smallholder Farmers

A New Era in Agriculture is Underway – A Look at Digital Farmer Profiles with GSMA’s mAgri

The advent of digital farmer profiles might lead to a new era in agriculture. Mobile technology, remote sensors, blockchain and big data are beginning to transform the lives of smallholder farmers, changing how farmers grow food, access credit, apply pesticides and so much more.

mSTAR interviewed Daniele Tricarico from GSMA’s mAgri Programme. The mAgri Programme, profiled in the new report, Digital Farmer Profiles: Reimagining Smallholder Agriculture, forges partnerships between mobile operators, technology providers and agricultural organizations. By providing deep technical expertise to service providers, it supports scalable commercial mobile services that impact smallholder farmers and the agricultural industry at large. This interview is part of a 2-post blog series on digital farmer profiles.

mSTAR: What are digital farmer profiles in your own words, and what promise do they hold for smallholder farmers?

Daniele Tricarico (DT): With digital farmer profiles, we are looking at “functional identities” that are created via digital means. Functional identity can be defined as a form of identity that is created with a specific purpose in mind, such as enabling unbanked farmers to access financial services and therefore improving their livelihoods. A functional identity, developed and issued for a single, well-designed purpose or service, is usually created with the support of private organization (e.g. mobile operators, banks, agribusinesses). The purpose we are interested in, at the GSMA mAgri, is to enable access to financial services (e.g. credit, insurance). We are also interested in understanding how mobile-enabled digital profiles can help farmers comply with traceability and certification requirements in agricultural value chains, so they can improve their agricultural practices and products and have access to better prices. As private organizations play a key role in creating functional identities, we are working to understand how farmers can maintain visibility, control and ultimately ownership over their digital profile through mobile.

mSTAR: How does GSMA’s mAgri Programme help harness data for the benefit of smallholder farmers?

DT: The GSMA mAgri Programme is working to support the digitization of agricultural value chains. Our objective is to use mobile technology to address a number of pain points in the agricultural last mile, the final link in the value chain between buyers and sellers of crops. By digitizing the last mile, we want to address pain points associated with handling cash (risk and security) that are experienced by buyers (agribusinesses and cooperatives) and farmers in agricultural value chains. A key entry point to last mile digitization is the transition from cash to digital payments from agribusinesses to farmers for the procurement of crops. By facilitating this transition, we can address key business problems experienced by agribusinesses and generate crucial socioeconomic impact for farmers. Digitizing the main cash inflow of agricultural households (the agri payments) and moving physical cash into digital wallets in rural areas is fundamentally an entry point to financial inclusion for unbanked rural families. The transactional data that is generated in the last mile (e.g. mobile money transactions, digital receipts), as well agriculture-specific data and alternative datasets, such as mobile voice and data usage, can all be used to build an economic profile (or a functional identity) for the farmer, helping them over time to access formal financial services.

At the GSMA mAgri, we have unique relationships with agribusinesses and mobile operators that host a number of data points to create digital farmer profiles. At present, we are working very closely with our partners to develop a solid understanding of what kind of farmer and farm data is required for different purposes. Besides ensuring that farmers maintain overall understanding, visibility and control over the data they share with third parties, we also want to ensure that they are not overburdened to provide data that does not contribute significantly to the analytics behind the service and to the ultimate purpose of the service itself (financial inclusion, traceability and certification). When we try to build a farmer profile, we are aware that to date, there are no standardized components of what a given profile should be for a specific purpose, so there is risk of “over-collecting” data that is in fact not needed.

 

 

mSTAR: What are some of the drawbacks to digital farmer profiles? How is GSMA working to tackle these?

DT: We have mentioned above issues of data ownership and control. Simple awareness and education on the part of the farmer on how data is used by a third party is a fundamental issue, even before we start thinking about data ownership and control. To address these key challenges, we must build awareness and create a strong value proposition for farmers. At GSMA mAgri, through working on designing and developing information services (agricultural value-added-services) targeting smallholders, we have developed expertise on how to design mobile-based services around the specific needs of farmers. Based on this experience, we emphasize the importance of taking a human-centered design approach. We have also developed expertise on how to educate farmers on the value and purpose of digital services and on how to on-board them on the services. We are now taking the same approach into our new work on supporting the digitization of agricultural value chains and in developing digital farmer profiles.

Besides awareness, education, and data ownership and control on the part of the farmer, we also see some systemic challenges in creating digital farmer profiles mostly related to availability of data and maturity of certain technologies. When it comes to geo-data from satellites (e.g. vegetation indexes, land mapping), for example, there is data becoming available that can support digital farmer profiles. However, other technologies that can be used to generate farmer/farm profile components such as drones are not widely available or at scale yet.

mSTAR: USAID has identified sustainability as a main challenge to digital farmer profiles, for example, identifying how digital farmer profiles can be sustained without NGO or government support. Do you see sustainability as a challenge for digital farmer profiles and if so, how can this challenge be solved?

DT: Sustainability is certainly a major challenge, however if there are solid use cases for digital farmer profiles, the sustainability challenge will be eventually addressed. The strength of taking a value chain approach to digital intervention, which is what we are doing at the GSMA mAgri, is that we work in partnership with the buyers in agricultural value chains to implement digital tools that can address their pain points as well as those of the farmers they work with. Working with the value chain, digital farmers’ profiles can be sustained because there is a commercial interest for value chain actors to access and support the creation of these profiles. For example, there is commercial interest to support traceability and certification in agricultural value chains or to provide financial services and strengthen the productivity and output of the farmers the agribusinesses work with. Mobile operators can also play a key role in sustainability by providing centralized farmer profile storage.

Daniele Tricarico is the Insights Director at GSMA mNutrition, comprising of the mAgri and mHealth programmes. In his role, Daniele leads the insights and publications work stream for both programmes. This work stream includes intelligence and analysis on the opportunities within the mAgri and mHealth sectors, as well as monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) and user experience (UX) research for mNutrition partners. Prior to joining the GSMA, Daniele was a senior telecoms analyst at Pyramid Research and Informa Telecoms & Media, focusing on consumer services in emerging markets. Daniele holds an MSc in new media and information systems from the London School of Economics and an MA from the University of Bologna.

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Photo credit: Morgana Wingard, USAID

Are the Days of Rotting Produce Behind Us? An Interview on Digital Farmer Profiles with Andrew Mack

An agriculture revolution may be on the horizon. Mobile technology, remote sensors, blockchain and big data are beginning to transform the lives of smallholder farmers, changing how farmers grow food, access credit, apply pesticides and so much more.

mSTAR interviewed Andrew Mack, the Founder and CEO of Agromovil and the Principal of AMGlobal Consulting. Agromovil, profiled in Digital Farmer Profiles: Reimagining Smallholder Agriculture, the new report from mSTAR, USAID, Feed the Future and Grameen Foundation, matches farmers, transporters and purchasers to get crops to market faster, capturing value for smallholders and consumers. Agromovil has won a World Bank-supported startup competition, graduated from USIP’s PeaceTech Accelerator and is set to launch in Colombia in early 2019. This interview is part of a 2-post blog series on digital farmer profiles.

mSTAR: What are key issues smallholder farmers face today?

Andrew Mack (AM): Farmers around the world are producing more and are more and more connected to “best practices.” But farmers today lack two key things:

1) An easy way to get products to market when products are at their freshest and most valuable, and

2) A simpler way to connect more directly with markets, bypassing some of the many intermediaries that siphon off the value of their production in the current agriculture ecosystem.

mSTAR: What is Agromovil and how does it use data to tackle those issues?

AM: Agromovil is an app-based platform that helps make the match between producers, transporters and offtakers. It allows farmers to match with the transport they need, when they need it and to find buyers that use the platform (called the MATCH). It enables transporters to build optimized routes picking up from various small farmers, making transport more efficient and profitable, and getting crops to market when needed (the BATCH). And, it enables all parties to pay on the platform, avoiding the need to take large amounts of cash to the field, making transactions safer and helping bring small farmers into the banking system and building credit histories (the PAY). Using data around location and production, our algorithms for optimized pickup and our matching functionality enable big efficiency gains. MATCH, BATCH and PAY is simple for everyone to understand.

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mSTAR: How did you come up with the idea for Agromovil?

AM: I have spent more than 30 years working around Africa and Latin America. Everywhere I go I have seen the same image — a smallholder farmer sitting by the side of the road with his or her bags of produce waiting for transport, waiting while the fruits of their labor and the economic future of their families go bad in the hot sun. After a particularly busy four years of travel, touching more than 20 global south countries, I created a team at the office to look into the issue and found two interesting things.

1) We found that that the market need for a solution was enormous (over 30 percent of crops never make it to market in nearly every emerging market and $150 billion in loss each year).

2) We found that new connectivity and demographic trends, like younger farmers returning to take over land farmed by their parents, meant that the underpinnings of a new dynamic were there. Three years ago, a solution like Agromovil wouldn’t have been possible, today it is.

We got to work, building partnerships with Carnegie Mellon University, the Toyota Mobility Foundation, co-ops and banks, and working with farmers, transporters and experts in the development agencies. We did a lot of listening and refined our ideas. It has been amazing.

mSTAR: What are keys to make digital farmer profiles successful for smallholder farmers?

AM: Digital farmer profiles need first and foremost to be relevant to the number one issue for farmers. The number one issue is not the quality or quantity being produced, it is income. Farmers are simply not earning what they should be earning. Transporters are working too hard to pick up too few goods and offtakers are paying too much — they would also like to get their goods more directly.

Profiles need to focus on production as a business. We do this by enabling ratings, helping create credit and payments histories and in other ways. There is tremendous value in the production and simple business data that is trapped (along with goods) inside the current inefficient ecosystem. This value needs to be captured more efficiently.

mSTAR: USAID has identified sustainability has a stumbling block for the success of digital farmer profiles. How do you see getting around this stumbling block?

AM: No part of technological innovation exists on its own. All pieces need to return to the key needs of producers and the parties that serve them, and this means money. Sustainability will come when farmers are able to unlock the “freshness premium” that consumers will pay. It will come when transporters can unlock a “route premium” and more efficiently serve small and remote communities. And it will come when farmers and buyers can capture a “directness premium,” bypassing intermediaries that cost a lot but add little value. Our goal is to create more than sustainability. We’re aiming to help the sector grow, and all of this depends on unlocking trapped value.

Andrew Mack is internationally-recognized for his work on corporate social responsibility, public-private partnership, and Internet policy, working with clients like Chevron, AT&T, Anheuser Busch, ICANN, the World Bank and Toyota. 

Watch mSTAR’s new video on digital farmer profiles below:

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‘She doubled her production that year-‘ 2017 Digi Winner Impacts the Lives of Ethiopia’s Farmers

We’re taking a behind-the-scenes look at the 2017 Digi winners. Hear their take on what it means to be a Digi winner and the power of digital tools. This interview was conducted with Mekdes Girmaw, Project Director for the Digital Integration to Amplify Agricultural Extension Project. All USAID projects and activities are invited to apply for the 2018 Digi Awards here. 

Q: What’s the project?

Mekdes Girmaw (MG): Digital Integration to Amplify Agricultural Extension harnesses locally-produced video, radio, interactive voice response and mobile data collection combined with traditional extension workers to spread information about best practices to smallholder farmers. One third of the farmers reached, 40 percent of whom are female farmers, have adopted at least one new practice.

Q: What’s the local impact?

MG: Take Ms. Jorge, a farmer in Becho district of Oromia region, Ethiopia. She participates regularly in her village farmer development group meetings. She watches localized videos featuring local farmers talking about best agricultural practices and discusses the practices with group members and the extension agent. She also is engaged with her local community listener group that comes together to regularly listen to participatory radio campaigns. The Aybar Broad Bed Maker (BBM) tool was introduced in a video as well as during radio segments.

Ms. Jorge listened to the radio program and watched videos that discussed the benefit of the tool – to create furrows and drain excess water from water-logged soils. Although extension agents had introduced the tool at a local demonstration plot during years past, many farmers including Ms. Jorge did not have the confidence to assemble and use it. After watching the videos and listening to the radio broadcasts, Ms. Jorge worked with extension agents and tested the Aybar BBM during her planting of one hectare of an improved variety of teff. By using the tool, and by changing her management practices of teff, she doubled her production that year.

Q: What surprised you when implementing this project?

MG: We work in very close collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture in Ethiopia. Digital Green, a project implementing partner, aims to leverage pre-existing structures such as the farmer development groups and the country’s agricultural extension structure, and layer digital technology onto those structures to increase smallholder farmer incomes. The Ministry of Agriculture in Ethiopia is eager to maintain the momentum that the Digital Integration project has spurred; they have begun institutionalizing the end-to-end video-enabled extension approach and are eager to leverage IVR and radio to support smallholder farmers as well.

We also learned that adding more ICT channels do not always generate deeper impact. Mobiles are often useful for exchanging data or smaller information that fluctuates (such as market prices or weather); whereas video provides rich information and has the ability to motivate viewers. We know that ICT is not a substitute for face-to-face human interactions; the two need to be paired and work in complementary ways.

Q: What would you say to other projects to encourage them to use digital tools?

MG: The content of digitally-delivered messages within the agricultural space really needs to be tailored and contextualized for greater farmer uptake. If practices are broken down by tangible adoption points and modified for each target group, messages could be powerful for the farmers watching, and for those with whom they share information.

It would be great if projects that are using ICT mapped out their country’s ICT ecosystem to sustainably scale and drive impact from scale.

Q: What does it mean to be a Digi Award winner?

MG: We are excited that the consortium partners, Awaaz.de, Dimagi, Farm Radio EthiopiaFarmerInternational, and Digital Green, as well as all of the key partners of this project, the Ministry of Agriculture in Ethiopia, the Agricultural Transformation Agency, AGRA & their grantees, were recognized for the integrated work that took place to support smallholder farmers in Ethiopia. The project was an enriching, encouraging experience and we’ve learned from it. We look forward to continuing to bridge gaps and find solutions to continue supporting smallholder farmers to increase their incomes and leveraging the lessons learned from this project to do so efficiently and effectively.

mSTAR and USAID developed videos of each winner, viewable here. All USAID projects and activities are invited apply to the 2018 Digi Awards.  

AMA Innovation Lab and D2FTF Use Digital Tools to Break Down Barriers to Agricultural Insurance

This blog was originally posted on Agrilinks. To read the original, click here. 

By: Tara Chui, Assistant Director, AMA Innovation Lab, UC Davis

In the developing world, there is little agriculturalists can do to protect themselves and their families from weather volatility. When shocks occur, many families have to resort to defaulting on loans, selling assets, reducing their meals or pulling children out of school. Because of this, even before disaster strikes, many farmers pass on high reward, but potentially risky, opportunities. Even though additional investments in farm productivity could help the household get out of poverty, these investments could also increase the household exposure to risk. This means many families don’t take the growth opportunities available to them. In this way, risk exposure both makes families poor and keeps families poor.

At the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Assets and Market Access (AMA Innovation Lab), we’ve found that agricultural index insurance, by transferring these risks away from farmers, can increase household resilience and enable smallholder farmers to take advantage of productive opportunities that are available to them. By avoiding costly coping mechanisms and taking advantage of growth opportunities, households and communities can make productive investments and can set themselves on a growth trajectory.

Many agricultural insurance pilots, despite indications of positive welfare impacts, have not been taken to scale. Many of the challenges they face are things like consumer education, sales and distribution in remote locations and small sales at a time.

One of the most successful index insurance projects – Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) in East Africa – was met with a series of barriers in making the product accessible to those who stood the most to benefit from the product. For example, pastoralists, by definition, are often not in their homes. This makes it exceedingly difficult to get the payouts to the insured pastoralists when payouts are triggered. If it takes too long for insured agriculturalists to receive their payouts, then they are forced to resort to the same costly coping strategies that they bought the insurance to avoid. This can also severely inhibit, or entirely demolish, an intervention. In the case of IBLI, the payout problems meant that the costs of distributing payouts were actually higher than the value of the payouts themselves.

Now, as part of the Kenya Livestock Insurance Program, the next stage of the ILBI intervention, insurers are moving to mobile phones to make sure payments get to the insured quickly. Because of the huge advances made in digital innovations, interventions can be made more feasible, and more of the value can be passed on to the pastoralists themselves.

At the AMA Innovation Lab, we see on the horizon many more opportunities for digital innovations to increase access to insurance through improved consumer education, sales platforms, insurance purchase aggregation and payout distribution platforms mechanisms. Moreover, digital innovations such as remote sensing and drones have high potential to make the indices used to trigger payouts better at seeing the reality of situations on the ground and making the contract much more valuable to farmers than was possible in the past.

As the AMA Innovation Lab continues to work with pilot studies and implementation partners – in both public and private sectors – digital innovations can make what once was infeasible now feasible. And Feed the Future’s new guide, Using Digital Tools to Expand Access To Agricultural Insurance, will provide implementation partners with an important resource to address these barriers that stand behind this important innovation and rural communities.

When used in concert with some of the tools being developed by the AMA Innovation Lab to promote the responsible and effective development of agricultural insurance, this guide can help to get high-quality, well-designed agricultural insurance products to those who stand to benefit the most, increasing the resilience of vulnerable populations. The framework it provides can help to identify both challenges and opportunities before beginning an intervention and to take advantage of the rapidly increasing number of technological advances that can make agricultural insurance work.

To learn more about agricultural insurance, the Digital Development for Feed the Future created Using Digital Tools to Expand Access to Agricultural Insurance. This resource shows USAID missions and implementing partners how to leverage the use of digital tools to expand the use agricultural insurance. 

Photo Credit: International Livestock Research Institute 

A Holistic Approach Leads 3,100 Farmers to Register for DFS Initiatives -PERSPECTIVES FROM MSTAR/BANGLADESH

As mSTAR’s project in Bangladesh comes to a close this fall, mSTAR/Bangladesh staff write on their perspectives from four years of a successful project, where mSTAR/Bangladesh helped enroll over 24,000 individuals—most of whom are women—into digital financial service accounts and helped USAID IPs and beneficiaries transact around $1.83 million digitally. The activity brought two new financial products to market with Bank Asia and IFIC Bank, including micro-credit to farmers with lower interest rates and more favorable repayment terms than any other alternative on the market today. Through this effort, mSTAR/Bangladesh facilitated loan disbursement to 795 farmers. Both banks are interested in scaling up these efforts.  

By Md. Majidul Haque, mSTAR/Bangladesh Technical Lead for Digital Financial Services

Digital financial services (DFS) are playing a key role in achieving financial inclusion objectives worldwide, and Bangladesh is no different from global trends.

The mSTAR/Bangladesh team has been working in the DFS space in Bangladesh since September 2013 and has seen firsthand the phenomenal growth in DFS adoption, particularly mobile financial services (MFS), in the country over the last couple of years.

While the adoption of DFS has increased rapidly, barriers to DFS uptake remains a concern for traditionally marginalized and financially excluded populations in Bangladesh. DFS usage in Bangladesh is mostly composed of cash-in and cash-out services, which is in part due to limited availability and awareness of additional use cases. Marginalized and financially excluded populations, however, require a wider range of financial solutions and serving them presents both unique opportunities and challenges in the design and delivery of these solutions. There is no single solution. Innovative DFS products and services are the only way to address those unmet needs.

mSTAR/Bangladesh (mSTAR/B) has helped to successfully pilot test two completely new DFS innovations (see more here and here) in Bangladesh to provide smallholder farmers with access to agricultural loans, savings, transfers and merchant payments. These pilots are the first examples to date in Bangladesh where a bank and MFIs have partnered to extend micro-credit agricultural loans to farmers. Farmers are also able to use such micro-credit to securely and easily purchase inputs from participating retailers through a digital channel, in particular through mobile phones and NFC-enabled debit cards. Farmers are now able to access micro-credit at rates less than half of what they had previously had access to and with extremely flexible re-payment terms and conditions, with repayment due in full after six months, as opposed to weekly repayments from other sources.

While implementing those DFS innovations, there were few areas where we had to give some distinct concentration to successfully support optimal results from these pilots so that these initiatives can be scaled up in future. We found the following to be particularly important in that regard.

  • Needs Assessment: A needs assessment is very important before designing and implementing any innovations through any channel, whether DFS or not. In case of the above-mentioned innovations, we conducted DFS assessments for Agricultural Value Chains (AVC) and separately Rice Value Chains (RVC) to understand the needs, capacity and aspirations of the different value chain actors.
  • Selection of DFS Provider and Target Base: Selecting a DFS provider is not always easy. DFS providers have different service offerings, pricing, interest, reach, and customer service. Successfully deciding which DFS provider is the right fit for the pilot requires planning and research. Similarly, it is also recommended to start off pilots in one or two areas on a small scale at the beginning. Learnings and experiences from such pilots can be used to design large scale transitions. For these two pilots, we partnered with Bank Asia Limited and USAID’s Agricultural Extension Support Activity (AESA) project, implemented by Dhaka Ahsania Mission (DAM), as well as IFIC Bank Limited and the USAID RVC project, implemented by IRRI/Bangladesh.
  • Product Design & Defining Service Delivery Channel: Throughout the product design process and service delivery channel identification, strong involvement of all partners is essential to shape and guide the development of product concepts. In our case, through active participation from all partners, they were able to deliver flexible micro-credit solutions tested through both mobile phones and NFC-enabled debit card for two groups of target customers.
  • Setting Pilot Goals and Expectations: It is important to set goals and expectations of the pilot, which eventually helps to determine focus, define specific measurable targets and offer motivation. Before starting these pilots, we worked with the partners to define all the parameters that should be achieved and how we would define success.
  • Coordination among Stakeholders: Synchronization between stakeholders carries a huge importance to make an initiative successful. In our pilots, all partners were very clear and agreed in writing to pilot objectives, their roles and benefits, the operating model and other relevant issues.
  • Training and Field Readiness: Providing field forces and the targeted customer base with training and capacity building on how the services work and their potential benefits are critical, as is thinking about how to communicate these messages to other relevant parties. Along with our partners, we helped to conducted several trainings and workshops before implementing those mentioned pilots.
  • Capturing Pilot Impacts: It is very important to capture impacts from pilot testing to measure whether the pilot was successful and actually met the needs of the target base, as well as to identify possibilities to scale up the initiatives. For both our pilots, we conducted pre- and post-assessments with 109 farmers, six ag-input retailers and one MFI. Based on those assessments, it appears that in addition to the better interest rates and repayment terms, the loans have also enabled farmers more flexibility in the types of inputs they purchase. Thanks to these products, farmers are no longer dependent on credit from retailers, who would often push them to buy certain products. In addition, for farmers who previously had higher interest loans with rapid repayment, these products offer more flexibility on when they can sell their crops as the flexible repayment terms enable them to sell their crops later at a higher price, rather than rushing to sell.

The mSTAR/Bangladesh team, along with all other partners, is now working to scale up those initiatives. More than 3,100 farmers and 50 ag-input retailers have already registered through these initiatives in just 10 months since they launched. While this is only a drop in the bucket of a country with more than 160 million people, we hope that these ground-breaking innovative products will serve as inspiration to catalyze a revolution in agricultural financing in Bangladesh.

Md. Majidul Haque has just under a decade of experience in the technology and financial services sectors that include telecom, banking and international development organizations with a focus on new business, product development, project management, action research and business development related to digital financial services (DFS), financial inclusion, e-commerce, payment gateway & value-added services (VAS). Majidul has successfully introduced DFS to a wide range of segments, including smallholder farmers, ag-input retailers, local government officers, community health workers, ultra-poor women, slum dwellers, ready-made garment workers and field staffs. He served as the technical lead – DFS with FHI 360 from April 2016 until July 2017.

Digital Development for Feed the Future: Building an Innovative Community of Practice to Respond to Smallholder Farmers’ Needs

This post is excerpted from the first blog post in a two-part Agrilinks series focusing on data-driven agricultural development. It was authored by Karina Lundahl, Facilitator for USAID’s Innovation for Data-Driven Agriculture Convening on April 27–28, 2017.

With the continued global proliferation of smartphones, sensors and advanced analytics, opportunities and challenges relevant to smallholder agriculture in emerging economies are increasing. In the focus countries of the U.S. Government’s Feed the Future initiative, smartphone adoption increased an incredible 800 percent between 2010–2015 according to data from GSMA Intelligence. And in 2017, the combined processing power of global smartphones will surpass the processing capacity of all servers worldwide. To create an agile and informed response to technological opportunities addressing the context-specific problems faced in developing regions, a diverse group of thinkers and innovators is required.

Addressing this, USAID, in collaboration with the Sustainability Innovation Lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder (SILC), hosted its second convening focused on building a cross-industry community of practice in data-driven agricultural development. Representatives from the U.S. Global Development Lab and Bureau for Food Security at USAID joined a group of researchers, tech innovators, funders and development practitioners to discuss the state of the industry as well as paths forward for data-driven approaches to agricultural development. Through a series of presentations, panels and workshop activities, three major themes emerged:

1. Opportunities and challenges in the data landscape: collection, analysis, open sharing and distribution

2. How to better incorporate smallholder farmer concerns during design and implementation

3. Engaging a diverse community of practice

Convening facilitator Karina Lundahl unpacks these themes with proven examples in the full Agrilinks blog. Read the post to see case examples of how these themes respond to smallholder farmers’ needs.

Digital Development for Feed the Future is a collaboration between USAID’s Global Development Lab and the Bureau for Food Security and is focused on integrating a suite of coordinated digital tools and technologies into Feed the Future activities to accelerate agriculture-led economic growth and improved nutrition.  

For more information on Digital Development for Feed the Future’s work on data-driven agricultural development, please read the Key Findings Report from the Innovation for Data-Driven Agriculture convening in April 2017. 

Photo credit: Tanya Martineau, Prospect Arts, Food for the Hungry

New Video Shows How Mobile Money Makes Inroads in Malawi

This is the second of a three-week blog series on digital financial services for agriculture. This series showcases mSTAR and the Digital Development for Feed the Future team’s recently released interactive online resource and instructional videos, made to complement The Guide to the Use of Digital Financial Services in Agriculture. The online resource breaks down the steps of how to use digital financial services in agriculture.

Malawi’s economy is “built on the backbone of the smallholder farmer,” says Kilyelyani Kanjo, who served as Chief of Party of the FHI 360-led Feed the Future Malawi Mobile Money Project. But smallholder farmers face a major challenge: cash. Farmers who transact in cash face issues of theft and security, and they incur huge costs as they travel long distances to access banks.

“There’s a better way to move money: mobile money.” Kilyelyani says. In Malawi, mobile phones have penetrated the rural areas. Phones have become ubiquitous. With mobile money services, farmers can access their bank account as long as they have their phone. Through support by Feed the Future, the U.S. government’s global hunger and food security initiative, the project focuses on strengthening the ecosystem so that mobile money can take off.

To do this, the Feed the Future Malawi Mobile Money Project takes a strategic approach. It builds capacity for service providers, banks, and regulators. Kilyelyani and her team create spaces where stakeholders, including competitors, share ideas, forge partnership and work together to strengthen mobile banking in Malawi. The project works on issues around financial literacy and creates public awareness campaigns.

Their efforts have made a significant impact in the uptake of mobile money in Malawi. In 2012, there were 200,000 mobile money subscribers in Malawi. Now, there are 2 million. Moreover, the government is closely involved in and has formally recognized the project’s efforts through a collaboration called the Mobile Money Coordination Group.

“Mobile money is really an important element that any Feed the Future project can do,” says Steven Kulyazi, a Program Officer for the Malawi Mobile Money Project. Like in Malawi, mobile money can transform the reach and success of a project and impact agricultural outcomes for smallholder farmers, who are the backbone of many countries’ economies.

As Steven says, any USAID project can implement mobile money in their project. USAID is ready to help missions and partners identify specific challenges in value chains and integrate digital financial services into those corresponding challenges.

Watch this video to hear from Steven, Kileyelyani, and others on how the Malawi Mobile Money project successfully strengthens mobile money in Malawi.

 

To learn more about how to implement digital financial services in Feed the Future projects, read the Guide to the Use of Digital Financial Services in Agriculture. If you have specific questions or feedback, contact digitaldevelopment@usaid.gov.