A large percentage(%) of Nigeria's 200m population rely on smallholder farmers for their daily food needs. According to a research, 78% of rural small-scale farmers in Nigeria were financially excluded, 28% were recorded to have functioning bank accounts. This has an impact on their food production as farmers need funding to produce enough to eat and sell. Access to finance isn’t the only issue bothering smallholder farmers in Nigeria, there is also a recurring problem of adulterated farm input, substandard seeds and inconsistent weather conditions such as drought and flooding; which is sometimes seen as an act of God. Nigeria is estimated to be 320,000 metric tonnes deficient in quality seed availability.

A large percentage(%) of Nigeria's 200m population rely on smallholder farmers for their daily food needs. According to the research, 78% of rural small-scale farmers in Nigeria were financially excluded, 28% were recorded to have functioning bank accounts. This has an impact on their food production as farmers need funding to produce enough to eat and sell. Access to finance isn’t the only issue bothering smallholder farmers in Nigeria, there is also a recurring problem of adulterated farm input, substandard seeds and inconsistent weather conditions such as drought and flooding; which is sometimes seen as an act of God. Nigeria is estimated to be 320,000 metric tonnes deficient in quality seed availability.

Begging questions

Our Decision
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We decided to retain the USSD model because it is the easiest way to reach the unbanked; Small holder farmers, regardless of their education status can access the product without internet and sophisticated phones.Coming to this conclusion was easy because; More than 80% of farmers in Nigeria are smallholders and a large part of these numbers are in the rural area and are uneducated, hence needs to access financial services in the simplest possible form; USSD made this possible even with the smallest phones.

An all-inclusive platform that gives Farmers access to quality input from carefully selected input sellers, Weather advisory services, a mobile wallet that can be funded and used to pay for services and ultimately a credit scoring system that tracks a Farmer’s usage(transactions), which eventually qualifies them for a loan.

We looked at the financial market to see if there is any farmer-focused product that solves the financial inclusiveness, provides access to quality input and provides weather advisory services to Farmers

To own an account in Nigeria, users need to undergo a basic KYC process. There are challenges with this; there is an existing trust issue in place; a lot of people are being scammed and robbed via their bank details, hence farmers in the age bracket will most likely frown at any process that requires these details.
So how do we develop an onboarding process that ensures trust and converts users?

We built the product with the standard KYC and tested it with Users. While registering, users supplied:

Timeout issue; Every USSD requests times out after 20 secs of inactivity, we observed that 70% of users couldn’t go past the last name stage. Only 10% completed the registration.

We Introduced Session storage/cache to enable users continue from where they stooped. So, if the user stops while inputing the last name or the session timed out, they continue from where they stopped whenever they dial the code

The final iteration in this onboarding process was the integration of a third party API that supplies user details immediately they dial the code. So we retrieve their name, date of birth and they only supply their pin and progress. This process increased conversion by 80%.

BVN (Bank verification number), users need to supply their BVN to be able to get a wallet account. Users get 10points when they add their BVN. The points can be used to access loans(credit scoring) or converted to cash. Each point is one Naira.

User needs to add their state, local government areas and their crops or livestock to be able to get tailored input and weather advisories. We incentivized this feature to encourage them, each of these attracts 10points.

Over 150,000 farmers have been onboarded, out of which 72% of them are permanent farmers; Permanent farmers have gone through the registration process and have transacted with the platform.

The product is still in the early phases and it has covered 8 major cities in Nigeria. Next step is to tackle the delivery bottleneck and ensure that Farmers get the produce on time.