2017 ICT4D Conference

Smallholder farmers play a key role in the agricultural production of Ghana which has direct relationship with the country’s food security. Largely excluded from formal financial services, smallholder farmers’ access to credit is a major limiting factor to improving productivity and to escape the vicious cycle of poverty. However, majority of financially excluded persons have one form or another of informal lending/savings (person-to-person) that relies on relationships of trust between persons which existed long before banks, legal agreements and even currencies. Advances in technology and innovation has enabled alternative functionalities for mobile handsets beyond its original vision to supporting new and viable channel for mobile financial services that are experiencing rapid adoption in developing economies. Paytime, a Farmerline financial technology platform designed purposely to offer and extend an improved financial services to the unbanked smallholder farmer who hereto have been excluded from formal financial services. Combing the big data points generated from traditional P2P lending models, production, sales, operations and payments data captured in the platform, a non-collateral based credit profile is created for the smallholder farmer. The insight and prediction helps Farmerline and financial actors to extend the much needed financial services to farmers. This comes on the back of over 3 years of building technology solutions to improve access to agricultural information, supply chain data and a robust working relationship with farmers in Ghana. The paper seeks to share some initial lessons from the activities of Farmerline in piloting the platform with 200 smallholder farmers in Ghana’s cocoa sector.