ACCESS to financial solutions remains a key component in driving economic growth among Zambian farmers. 

According to the 2015 FinScope Survey, there has been a positive trend in Zambia towards financial inclusion, with exclusion levels having dropped from 62.7% in 2009 to 40.7% in 2015, although farmers were considered financially excluded at a higher rate of 48.7% six years ago. Good Nature Agro (GNA), a for-profit social enterprise working with rural farmers in the legume value chain, supplies high-quality legume seed and commodities while improving smallholder farmers’ income and lifting them out of poverty. 

In Zambia, GNA works with over 6,000 legume seed growers and commodity farmers across Eastern, Northern and Central provinces to improve their farming yields and facilitate access to relevant solutions.

Digital Financial Services Smallholder Farmers Africa

In trying to gain a clearer understanding of farmers’ cash flow patterns that are currently part of their grower network compared to those that are not, GNA, with financial support from Comic Relief, commissioned a year-long financial diaries study to provide insights into cash flow patterns of smallholder farmers.

Financial diaries, when complemented by product design tools, are envisioned to be used to help design appropriate offerings to farmers.  Understanding this will help GNA to support GNA farmers in the company’s service offering, and to connect them to tailored financial products and services. Additionally, GNA is looking to develop a layaway payments product that will allow farmers to purchase GNA seed with an inputs package. 

GNA engaged Agova to design the financial diaries study, train enumerators, supervise data collection, analyze the data and provide insights that will inform the design of financial products for farmers.

In the project setup phase, Agova designed the study methodology, the research tools and set up the CSPro platform for data collection. Agova also trained a team of six enumerators who have since been deployed in Eastern (4 enumerators), Central (1 enumerator), and Northern (1 enumerator) provinces.

In addition to this, Agova also conducted a verification exercise to validate the initial farmer profiles collected in 2020 using an Agova-designed verification survey using KoBoToolBox, and remotely delivered training to the enumerators.

The second phase of the study started in September 2020, with enumerators collecting profile information from 198 farmers. The enumerators have since visited the farmers once every two weeks to collect data on household income and expenditure over the two weeks.

The final phase of the project will be reported between August and October 2021. 

Insights generated from this study will help GNA to understand inflows and outflows of cash among GNA’s farmers and divide them into different target segments, understand what kinds of digital financial products may be best suited to smallholder farmers, especially savings products for agricultural inputs, and gather useful information for financial institutions that currently offer, or are interested in offering, savings and credit to farmers.

As of May 2021, the farmers have each been visited an average of 14 times over 8 months, and this will continue until August 2021. A combined total of 2,772 interviews have so far been conducted.