Mercy Corps AgriFin believes that digital financial services can improve farmer livelihoods by helping them gain direct access to a range of inclusive and empowering financial, information and market access services.
Though digital financial services, digital information, advisory services, market access, logistics, climate smart activities and gender inclusivity, AgriFin brings together innovative organizations to design and deliver quality products and services tailored for smallholder farmers.
“Our aim is to connect smallholder farmers to products and services that increase their productivity and income by 50%, with a 40% target population of Women and Youth,” said Collins Marita, Technical Director Strategic Learning, Mercy Corps AgriFin. “We believe that digital innovation can revolutionize the way small scale producers (SSPs) feed the world, that’s why, based on years of learning and iterating, we built the AgriFin model to facilitate that process.”
With over 13 years of experience in research and project management, with a specialty in financial and agricultural sector-related research projects, Marita believes that access to the right tools will help smallholder farmers build the resilience they need against climate and emergency shocks and continue to feed their communities.
His experience in the health and ICT sectors, spanning over ten countries in Africa and Asia designing and implementing studies, has led to the adoption of digital tools such as such as Mobile Apps, Interactive voice, SMS, chatbox, peer-to-peer education, climate insights, online markets to aid small scale producers improve their trade.
With plans to reach 5 million more small scale producers by 2025, Mercy Corps AgriFin’s the current iteration of the program (AgriFin Digital Farmer II) has reached over 4.6 million SSPs with critical digital services since inception in 2021 and a total of more than 21.5million since its launch and even being part of the team that provided crucial information to farmers during the COVID 19 pandemic and locust invasion in 2019-2020 in East Africa.
Equipped with eight years of learning and a vibrant network of partners, AgriFin is expanding its focus to digital climate-smart agriculture and creating meaningful employment for youth in agriculture and rural economies, working toward a resilient future of farming for SSPs across Africa and beyond.
Agriculture in developed markets is a different ballgame and AgriFin is seeking to change the ballgame for SSPs and remove handcuffs, through its initiatives. The program has assessed 48 low-middle income countries and sees there is an ample opportunity to engage and strengthen digital ecosystems across the globe to take millions more farmers from subsistence to sustainable. His stint at the Financial Inclusion Insights (FII) research program for Kenya, with an additional focus on the agricultural value chain in eight countries, saw him coordinate research on smallholder farmer households’ use of digital financial services supported by the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP). At CGAP and IFDC, Collins learned the possibilities of improving farmer livelihoods through the formation of agribusiness clusters.
“AgriFin employs a market facilitation model to drive scalable, commercial product innovation for smallholder farmers,” said Marita. “We act as a trusted broker to promote innovation and collaboration amongst partners.”
AgriFin partners agricultural ecosystem actors and to date it works with 150 organisations to deliver digitally enabled solutions. Partners include mobile network operators, financial institutions, farmer networks, technology innovators, agriculture value chain players, government, and other key market stakeholders.