Farmer cooperative training and mfarmpay digital finance in Ghana
developers SyeComp
It is a truism that smallholder farming is presently seen as essential to strengthening and sustaining food systems, while becoming a viable channel for climate adaptation in Africa. Boosting smallholder farmer cooperative operations and professionalism is important in establishing conduits for service provisioning and digital service adoption at scale.
In line with this, Syecomp through its mfarmPay digital finance project and partner institutions in Ghana has embarked on a four-week farmer cooperative training and mfarmpay awareness activity in 10 communities in March, 2021 in Eastern Region, Ashanti Region and Volta Region in Ghana. This is part of a nationwide farmer cooperative training activities in 2021 to expand bundled digital service adoption in agriculture in Ghana and enrich market presence.
Syecomp, over the past two years has onboarded over 65,000 interested farmers across various commodity segments in Ghana, including tree crops, pulses, vegetables, grains, and tubers to mfarmPay and has built its initial version of a digital credit scoring infrastructure to de-risk smallholder farmer financing, being used by partner agri-lenders in Ghana.
mfarmpay digital finance project is implemented in Ghana with support from Mastercard Foundation Funds for Rural Prosperity (FRP) project and is reaching 120,000 rural farmers across all agroecological regions in Ghana. The project is actively mapping and digitizing millions of smallholder farm parcels and validating data from mfarmPay’s Initial Data Request (IDR) in 2019.
Participating smallholder farmers and cooperatives are also receiving bundled agronomic extension on climate and weather information, Covid-19 helpline advisory support, farmer cooperative strengthening, financial literacy, agrochemical anti-counterfeiting, farm production practices and market linkage strategies.