Guide to the Use of Digital Financial Services in Agriculture
This Guide is based on four in-country assessments conducted jointly by the USAID Bureau for Food Security’s (BFS) Office of Market and Partnership Innovations (MPI), the U.S. Global Development Lab DFS team and USAID’s FHI 360-led Mobile Solutions Technical Assistance and Research (mSTAR) project. The assessments covered four different Feed the Future countries: Tanzania and Uganda, relatively mature DFS markets; Ghana, a rapidly expanding DFS market; and Haiti, a relatively nascent DFS market.
The Guide to the Use of Digital Finance in Agriculture provides a quick and easy-to-use tool to understand how digital financial services (DFS) can help address some of the challenges that smallholder farmers are experiencing today, such as lack of access to financial services and convenient payment systems.
The goal of this Guide is to identify specific challenges in value chains that can be addressed by improved payments or financial services, and then to identify corresponding DFS solutions to these specific challenges, with the aim of improving the ability of value chains to increase farmer incomes. In doing so, it is possible to increase farmer household access to a transaction account that builds household resiliency and offers access to payments and financial services long after an aid project or intervention is complete.
