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Digital Payments That Resonate with Low-Income Farmers

A major Mozambican cotton producer found that local farmers thought bank accounts were only for wealthier people. It teamed up with an innovative bank to show that wasn’t true.

Is Funding for Rural Finance Going Where It’s Needed Most?

Global funding for rural finance has risen to nearly $5 billion. Are funds reaching communities with the greatest needs?

Can Agro-Dealers Be the Last-Mile Rails for Digital Finance?

New CGAP partnerships test large agribusinesses' potential to bring financial services to millions of rural farmers.

5 Insights into Credit Scoring for Smallholders

Agricultural lending remains a frontier area even as the alternative lending space fills up with new players. Here are some early insights from CGAP's work on alternative credit scoring for smallholder farmers in Uganda.

Building Rural Digital Ecosystems: A New Role for Agribusinesses?

Bringing digital finance to the rural poor will require financial services providers to work more creatively with agribusinesses that have extensive experience serving last-mile clients.

Making Digital Payments Work for Low-Income Farmers

From hurling sacks of money out of planes to transporting cash in armored cars, the methods used to pay farmers in Uganda can be unsafe and inefficient. So why haven't digital payments taken off?

Mapping Africa’s Latest Innovations in Digital Finance

CGAP received nearly 200 proposals from digital financial services providers across Africa interested in piloting new products. A look at those proposals — from 30 countries — shows that innovations are spreading beyond hot spots like Kenya.

Youth Building Peace: What’s the Role of Financial Inclusion?

What does financial inclusion have to do with building peaceful societies? More than you might think.

Adapting the Graduation Approach for People with Disabilities

Here are nine lessons for how donors can adapt the graduation approach to help low-income people with disabilities build sustainable livelihoods.

Cultivating Opportunities for Women in Agriculture

National surveys in Mozambique and Tanzania show that women in agriculture do not diversify their incomes as much as men do. Equal access to financial services could help women to generate new sources of income.

Digitizing Smallholder Finance for the 93 Percent

Most digital financial services for smallholders target the 7 percent of farmers who already have buyers for their crops. What about services for the other 93 percent?

What Does the Future Hold for Youth Savings in Ethiopia?

Over the past five years, PEACE MFI S.CO's Lenege youth savings product has increased access to savings for low-income youth in Ethiopia. What can other financial service providers learn from its experience?

Ending Extreme Poverty: New Evidence on the Graduation Approach

SDG 1 is as exciting as it is daunting: End extreme poverty. The Graduation Approach has resulted in large and cost-effective impacts on ultra-poor households’ standard of living, ultimately enabling a sustainable transition to more secure livelihoods and an exit from poverty.

Future of Mobile Money for Cocoa Farmers in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana

New research from the World Cocoa Foundation explores the potential of mobile money to enhance cocoa farmers’ livelihoods in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana and paints a detailed persona of customers at the frontier of widespread adoption.

Five Fresh Facts from the Smallholder Diaries

How are smallholder families managing their money? What challenges do they face? What financial solutions can help? CGAP’s Financial Diaries with Smallholder Households ("Smallholder Diaries”) spent a year with 270 farming families in Mozambique, Tanzania, and Pakistan to find out.

Is the Hunger Season Really the Sick Season?

For many smallholders, "the hunger season," when little can be harvested, is the worst time of the year. What financial and other tools might help farmers to better endure the rainy, sick, and hungry months?

Digitizing Agricultural Value Chains: How Buyers Drive Uptake

Most companies don’t want to be the first in a sector to try something new and potentially unpopular. Dominant buyers must lead the way to drive large-scale mobile money uptake by smallholder farmers.

Digitizing Agriculture Value Chains: Seasonal Cash Flows

Examining the cash flows of coffee and sugar farmers in Uganda for a CGAP-commissioned project revealed a seasonal cycle that is unsuited to monthly accounting practices. There are many ways that financial services could be designed to assist these farmers.

Salam: Both a Greeting & Innovative Agricultural Financing Option

For over 6 million smallholder farmers in Pakistan, financing options are extremely limited. The Wasil Foundation, winner of the 2013 Islamic Microfinance Challenge, offers an alternative to traditional financing that enables farmers to build assets and sustainable livelihoods.

Digitizing Agriculture Value Chains: Building Value for Farmers

While there are clear benefits for buyers in digitized agricultural value chains, but the value proposition is less certain for farmers.