Digitizing Uganda's Farmers in Partnership with Mastercard Inc.’s Lab for Financial Inclusion

Feb 11, 2021

USADF has been at the frontline in equipping African farmer cooperatives, producer associations, and agripreneurs with the knowledge and tools they need to feed themselves and their communities, while improving their lives and livelihoods. Between the five-year period 2015–2019, USADF catalyzed agricultural-led economic growth through $61 million in grant capital to support more than 570 agriculture cooperatives and agribusinesses in becoming self-sufficient, improving productivity, increasing incomes for smallholder farmers, and enhancing food security for over 3 million people.  

USADF has a number of successful matching funds partnerships with African national and state-level governments, including with the Ugandan government. We are also leveraging private sector partnerships for greater impact; these partnerships allow us to reach more African smallholder farmers to help them implement their solutions. 

Through a partnership with Mastercard Inc.’s Lab for Financial Inclusion, USADF in 2019 established a pilot initiative for digitizing smallholder farmers and assisting food and cash crop purchasers in buying from more smallholder farmers more efficiently. Through this engagement, USADF sought to leverage its experience and expertise and empower thousands of smallholder farmers in Uganda by extending the reach of the Mastercard Farmer Network (MFN) platform, giving farmers digital access to markets, valuable inputs, financial services, and real-time pricing information. 

In 2019, USADF and Mastercard started implementation of Phase 1 of the MFN Pilot Program. A key objective of Phase I was to enhance the income-generating activities for participating farmers, as indicated by the following: 
 

  1. Identifying and onboarding to the MFN platform 10,000 farmers’ profiles, to include biographical information, location, and crop and payment details, along with transactions for produce harvested and sold;  

  1. Including in the MFN platform a minimum of two agribusiness buyers who intend to procure produce from recorded farmers; and  

  1. Facilitating and digitizing linkages of farmers with financial services through either mobile money or bank payments. 
     

USADF and Mastercard successfully completed Phase I of the agriculture digitization pilot in 2020. The initial phase reached more than 13,000 farmers through two farmer producer organizations (FPO). For 2021, USADF is co-creating a follow-on Phase II, 18-month program to refine the model and scale its impact by reaching 300,000 farmers in Uganda via 60 FPOs, onboarding 40 agri-buyers, and identifying a commercial bank as a key anchor of the program. 

This partnership with Mastercard’s Lab for Financial Inclusion, wherein we are supporting small scale farmers in gaining access to innovative technology, creates a unique opportunity to expand access to the formal economy and financial services for hundreds of thousands of farmers in Uganda and the rest of Africa. By joining forces, USADF and Mastercard are addressing shared goals to increase both financial and digital inclusion for smallholder farmers and increase prosperity at the base of the pyramid.