Our Experience

Agricultural Value Chain Mobile Finance (AgFin)

Project Description
The Agricultural Value Chain Mobile Finance (AgFin) project was a partnership between ASI, Tigo Cash, and OpenRevolution that helped the mobile financial sector develop tailored products and services to meet the unique needs of rural communities. With better access to mobile money technologies, rural farmers, particularly women, working in cocoa, palm oil, and dried fruits value chains are more financially literate, have better access to credit, and increases their overall participation in the formal financial sector. AgFin built on the proof-of-concept tested in the Rice Mobile Finance (RiMFin) project that reached 700 rice farmers with more than $345,000 in transactions thanks to a cheaper, more efficient, traceable, and transparent payment method via their mobile phones.

AgFin allowed three agricultural processing and export companies to provide mobile money payments to farmers, thus reducing transaction costs and risks associated with cash payments. The farmers also used the platform to pay utility bills and make loan payments.

Project Approach
AgFin sought to enhance access to sustainable financial services by: (1) facilitating financial inclusion of rural, under-served agribusiness value chain actors; (2) using mobile money transfer (MMT) technology to mitigate risks and lower costs of current payments mechanisms, particularly cash; and (3) providing technical assistance to test viability of MMT to improving current payment systems.

Impact and Accomplishments

• Reach up to 10,000 smallholder farmers in three value chains: cocoa, oil palm, and dried fruits with mobile money transfer technologies (60 percent of which are women)
• Have an indirect impact on an estimated 45,000 household members in the Western, Brong-Ahafo, Central, Eastern, and Ashanti regions
• Following project completion, lessons learned informed Tigo Cash’s full scale-up in 2017-2018 to 20,000 farmers

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