Women in agriculture sector learn about PacFarmer App
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Pacific Financial Inclusion Programme (PFIP) are working towards collecting knowledge on the perspective of women towards financial and digital products and services.
PFIP PacFarmer App Project officer, Simione Veilawa, said this was through the Transforming the Future of Work for Gender Equality (TFoW4GE) project. He added the project aims to generate actionable intelligence on women in the Pacific.
“For Fiji, we are targeting the PacFarmer App as the instrument to deepen women’s digital and financial inclusion and, in the process, use Human Centred Design (HCD) to try to improve usage of the app for women,” Mr Veilawa said.
“As part of the HCD work, our aim was to meet and interview women farmers and market vendors in main parts of Fiji.
“We had earlier conducted such field missions in the Central and Western parts of Fiji around December 2019.
“Hence, this month we conducted with female farmers in the North, especially in Seaqaqa, Dreketi and Savusavu.
“We are working with women groups and agri-agencies such as Sugar Cane Growers Fund, Fiji Rice Limited, Copra Millers Fiji Limited and Fiji Co-operatives Dairy Company Limited,” he said. “We are hoping that we will get new findings through HCD exercise that will serve as a baseline and provide valuable insights on the needs or pain points of women.
“Also we are trying to get inputs from women farmers and market vendors on their needs in order to develop targeted financial, digital products and services that will help to address problems faced by them.”
He said their aim was to use these inputs to improve the PacFarmer App in order to provide them access to relevant information and opportunities to grow their business.
Hence, Mr Veilawa added they were encouraging women to download the PacFarmer App and access the services available that will help them in their businesses.
He confirmed that this ongoing women empowerment programme will continue this year.