As the world advances in building sustainable technological based solutions to bring services closer to where they are demanded, leaving the underserved communities would actually make little sense that is why UNFFE is pushing for vital digital services that can improve the quality of life for the smallholder farmer to flourish in the 4th industrial revolution.
In 2022, UNFFE partnered with Mastercard and Yo Uganda Limited to scale out the Yo! Pay Agric platform to other UNFFE members and non- members and reach a target of one million farmers. The target was achieved through training sessions organized in districts within five regions of Mid-West, South-West, Central, Northern, West Nile and Eastern. A total of 400 Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) among them were farmer cooperative societies, District Farmers Associations, Savings and Credit Cooperatives, were
This training workshop looked at introducing the FPOs to the Yo! Pay Agric digital platform that intents to bring all farmers who are members of these FPOs into an ecosystem where they can interact directly with buyers from their locality, regions, national and international level as well give them access to service providers like banks, Insurance, agricultural input suppliers with quality seeds, agro-machinery equipments, agrochemicals, irrigation technologies plus veterinary services. The Yo! Pay Agric is actually promoting a digital platform that can drastically improve the reach and increase access of services by reducing the cost to serve farmers, and improve the effectiveness of service delivery.
“The digital platform enables users to keep records safe and accessible at all times but also has the ability to give a clean database of farmers, track all transaction history and make proper planning for service requests for each season.”
Daudi Ssentongo Yo! Pay Agric Project Coordinator at UNFFE
Based on the achievement in 2021 where 41 UNFFE members (District Farmers Associations -DFAs) were on boarded onto Yo Pay Agric and a data base of 110,000 individual farmers uploaded onto the platform, and now having over one million individual farmers onto the Yo Pay Agric platform, Mastercard Foundation is engaging UNFFE to upscale this initiative to reach 1000 farmers producer organizations in the next 3 years.
