Interaction between AgriTech and FinTech is key to ensuring that Farmers can benefit more from Agriculture. Well as AgriTech focuses mainly on introducing technology in to agriculture, integration with FinTech (financial technology) moves this a notch higher as it doesn’t only make farmers adopt technology for farming but also ensures that they are able to transact – make and receive payments from the comfort of their farms.
It is this interaction that Hamwe East Africa is spearheading. Started as an AgriTech in 2013, Hamwe has over the years transformed into an AgriTech – FinTech; all for the benefit of farmers.
“We work with underserved farmers in off the grid areas of Uganda and East Africa. Well as everybody else tried to work with Farmers in peri-urban areas and central region, for us, we decided to go to areas were farmers lack services such as internet access. These are the actual smallholder farmers that need support,” Stella N. Lugalambi, a co-founder and managing director of Hamwe East Africa noted.
She added: “We build a farmer management system that enables farmers get a farming system, digital identity and economic identity. We are giving smallholder farmers an identity that allows them to access finance because they will have a system with credible data to prove that they actually earn and can afford to manage this finance.”
Hamwe is active in Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi with plans to expand to the rest of East Africa in the near future.
“To date, we have over 400,000 farmers in Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. We are planning to go to Kenya and Tanzania and grow our numbers to one million farmers by 2025. The beginning was a bit difficult but now we onboard more farmers easily because we know what to do. Even farmers are also adapting easily.”
Lugalambi noted that they offer a complete agriculture support service. Hamwe East Africa’s bundled services to the over 400,000 farmers include farmers’ profiling, assessing farmers’ needs, identifying off takers, connecting farmers to inputs suppliers and ready markets, agronomy services, crop insurance, payments and access to credit.
“Majority of our members come from cooperatives. Our work is coordinated by digital community entrepreneurs that support between 100 to 300 farmers. The digital community entrepreneurs (DCE) talk to farmers at the last mile because we get them from the same community where the farmers come from so they can easily engage and support them. The DCEs report to Territory Executives at the district level,” she said.
She revealed that in order to further support farmers, they added FinTech solutions to the platform which are enabling farmers to easily transact.
“To ensure that our farmers are served well, we signed up with mobile network operators – MTN and Airtel for a payment gateway. We are directly connected with the mobile money operators so our farmers get their payments directly to their phones. We have also signed up with banks and Flexipay. These payment alternatives ensure that our farmers don’t have to be embarrassed walking long distances to banks to access their money.”
She nonetheless called upon the government, telecom operators and development partners to invest more in network upgrade and data connectivity as this will enable more farmers benefit more from these services.
On their part, she noted that Hamwe has partnered with Mastercard Inc to deliver a community pass – an electronic card that stores farmers’ information.
“We have just rolled out this card and it is so far being used by about 20,000 farmers. This is our newest innovation. It is accessible offline. We plan to upgrade it to even support payments in the future,” she concluded.
Hamwe has featured on Day 36 of the annual 40 Days 40 FinTechs initiative Season 5.
Run under HiPipo’s Include Everyone program that also encompasses other initiatives such as FinTech Landscape Exhibition, Women in FinTech Hackathon, Summit & Incubator, and the Digital and Financial Inclusion Summit and Digital Impact Awards Africa; the #40Days40FinTechs platform aptly provides a setting for the various players and stakeholders involved in digital and financial technology to exhibit their products and services. It also gives players a platform to share their ideas on how the unserved and underserved by the present financial systems can be brought into the fold.
With over 150 participants in the last four years, #40Days40FinTechs continues to be the world’s premier showcase event for innovations that are enabling underserved populations to join the digital economy space. We know that this can only get better owing to the inspiration and collaboration of our partners; Level One Project, Mojaloop Foundation, INFITX, Cyberplc Academy, Ideation Corner, and Crosslake Technologies. Most importantly, the initiative owes its continued success to the generous support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
