Digital Agriculture Reference Bureau

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Carol Kakooza | Jul 30, 2020 | in Digital change-maker challenge | Digital inclusion

Define three specific objectives that you would like to achieve with your proposal.

1.  To create a platform that provides visibility of the smallholder farmers to potential service providers through data and information where customised and suitable service packages can be channelled to the end-users.


2. To enhance financial inclusion (credit, general banking services and insurance) among the under-served community through our systems supported non-financial credit scoring (progress out of poverty credit score) that potentially substitutes the conventional credit assessment used by the financial institutions by availing digitalized profiles for reference of a less visible community


3. To provide value chain linkage among the critical agriculture value chain players including structured markets for agro-input, Produce, and other service delivery.

What problems (particularly in value chain competitiveness and global disruption) are your community’s stakeholders facing due to the Covid-19 pandemic?

Financial inclusion,  majority of the underserved communities, in terms of financial services, have continued to produce as little as their household financial resource and labour can support. The produce of is often of low quality since they continually use seeds and planting materials saved from the previous harvest, they are left to produce under the mercy of not only the weather but of pest and diseases and all these make the produce at the end of each season as little too only support household consumption while in other circumstances produce is not sufficient to support household food demand.   

Market linkages, information failures are among the critical factors that make agricultural markets inefficient. Trade links between buyers and sellers are created informally by word of mouth and rarely grow beyond established social circles. 

 Agricultural Extension, Uganda currently has about 3811 extension workers across the whole country particular serving under the public sector as per march 2019 Ministry of agriculture report. With over 12 million households practising agriculture and insufficient public funding to the agriculture sector, an estimated ratio of extension workers to farmers of 1:5000 is impractical to support the extension needs of the country and furthermore it’s far from the recommended 1:500. This thus means not all farmers in Uganda are able to directly reach an extension worker for professional guidance and assistance.

Covid 19 aggravated the condition as the lockdown cut off the movement key players such as loan officers, extension service providers, and access to inputs. With the unceratinity of whether the movement will be as free as before Data-Driven Agriculture is paramount.   

What minimum viable solution(s) are you proposing to address the challenge(s) in your community?

Progress out poverty credit score generated from geo-tagged profiles of the farmers allow for customised credit services that financial service providers use for reference on the creditworthiness of the farmers. The parameters considered range from land, its ownership, productivity, labour availability, household income, expenditure and over 160 extra data points from the farmer's profile. 

Alongside access to finance, insurance services are provided to the farmers registered on the platform. This also spreads the risk of agricultural lending since the risks attributed to weather such as drought, storms among others risks eases loan repayment upon farmers receiving their compensation.  It also allows continuity of farming projects as such shocks are absorbed by the insurance cover.

 With the DARB, marketing has been made possible through the data and statistics from several smallholder farmers. Collective marketing has the power to attract better buyers who buy in bulk while at the same time farmers attract affordable input supplies that are timely channelled to the farmers. Contract farming is enforced and thus enabling the farmers to benefit from their small scale farming endeavours.

Through our digital system that has a service centre, tailored messages are sent out to the farmers to support in support of their advisory needs.

 Our Last-mile agent network not only provides us the local data but also complements as the human interface in delivering last services and information.

Share your story (your narrative)

It’s generally acceptable for every developing country that lack of data and information constrains interventions.   Our work is based on a core principle of Data-driven Agriculture in which we provide an enabling ecosystem where solutions are in alignment with local needs.

With a network of tech-savvy agents in the communities, data is collected and last-mile services provided by the enterprises from an informed perspective through engaging critical sector players.

Only 10% of the farmers of 33 million farmers have access to finance to boost their productivity and it has stagnated at this percentage for the past 20 years. Of the 10% accessing credit 90% are in either large scale, medium-sized producers or those in clearly tight value chains

 Marketing is by word of mouth between sellers and buyers and rarely grow beyond established social circles.

While Extension has persistently depended on a non-viable farmer to agriculture adviser ratio of 1:5000

 Financial exclusion, informal and unreliable market and Lack of access to advisory and extension are very critical and require a holistic approach guided by data and information.

Geo-tagged profiles with Progress out of poverty Credit assessment for financial inclusion can be leveraged by the financial players  while Data-enabled market linkages from DARB, Service centre with an agent supported network through our business 2 business  and business 2 customer model, services are channelled to the smallholder farmers          

Please provide any additional relevant information that you would like to share.

1.  Tailored Extension and Advisory. 

To facilitate extension, advisory and related service delivery, we overlay farmer’s data onto soil maps to determine farmer soil type. As such we are able to offer solutions in line with crop suitability, soil health management while collaborating such information with ICT tools at the disposal of the agents in the fields. These tools include:

1. Fertilizer optimization tools used for a general assessment of the investment requirement of a given farmer in terms of we cost leveraging the information in the database, i.e. land size, crop option among others. It also offers basic cost-effective recommendation for fertilizer use.
2. aXiom Zorn Knowledge app - this is service in the box tool that is integrated within our system to provide a wide range of information including agronomic tips, weather alerts, market prices. It is used for information dissemination by agents as well as data collection.
3. Digital soil maps - farmers profiles are overlaid up to a sub-county level to support crop suitability decisions.  We also provide cluster Mapping of which is derived from GIS tags on all information that is collected