UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Mobile Transactions Zambia (MTZ), an enterprise in Zambia focused on providing financial services, have teamed up to develop a means by which e-Vouchers can be used to provide the country’s ministry of agriculture and livestock with bicycles for use by the lead farmers.
FAO is funding the Ministry of Agriculture to help over 8,000 lead farmers, local farmers working with the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock to pass information on conservation farming to other farmers.
This will see the lead farmers throughout the country acquire bicycles to facilitate their movements. A major problem the lead farmers face, according to FAO, is having to travel to up to 80 kilometres to reach their designated farmers.
Set for implementation in 24 districts of the country’s 10 provinces from starting this month, the e-voucher system also allows for instant acquisition of products with instant payments. Initially, paper based vouchers were in use.
MTZ is set to provide the voucher platform.
Local Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock staff would use mobile phones to link each lead farmer with their respective vouchers each worth K500,000.
The vouchers are redeemable at chosen retail agents chosen by the client, who in turn processes the voucher by accessing MTZ’s online platform via a mobile phone, to trigger an instant electronic payment into the agent’s MTZ account.
“It is an excellent system of distribution as it allows the farmer to select a bicycle that is suitable for the terrain and also accessibility to spares is better since the source is within their locality. Repairing of these bicycles is also convenient for the farmers as a result of local sourcing,” Mutale Chimba of FAO said.
The system is also a boost to the private sector as it assures them of readily available buyers, Chimba added.
