Mobile banking enhances agriculture
The AFC’s land bank has embraced mobile banking as the world becomes more digital and virtual. The mobile bank application allows customers to access services anywhere and anytime without visiting the bank.
Some of the services include bill payments (for Zesa Prepaid, Telone, Zuva, ZOL and Zinara, tollgate). There also instant airtime purchases for customers and their friends across all networks, for any amount!
The customers can also conduct : l Zipit; l Internal transfers; l Balance enquiry; and l Mini-statement.
There are also additional features like: l Branch locator; l Secure PIN logon; and l Pin management.
To register the customer can visit any nearest branch and will be instantly registered for mobile banking.
On a continent where extreme poverty and food insecurity plague nearly half the population, innovations that support the agricultural industry are essential.
Few such innovations have spread as quickly as mobile money. There are now nearly 146 million active accounts in sub-Saharan Africa, representing 10% of the region’s GDP (compared to less than 2% in most other parts of the world). But what does this have to do with agriculture? To answer that, consider these words from the United Nations, written in a 2019 update on the Sustainable Development Goals: “Strengthening the resilience and adaptive capacity of smallscale and family farmers . . . is critical to reversing the trend of the rise in hunger.”
In other words, to save our planet’s growing population from famine, we need to give agricultural workers tools designed to help them recover from disaster and increase productivity.
Mobile money is the most promising of those tools. Small-scale farmers in Africa need a secure place to save their money for emergencies, and they need the means to invest in better and more modern operations.
Given how dramatically mobile money services are growing in sub-Saharan Africa, they offer an unprecedented opportunity to significantly increase access to financial services and ease the flows of financial transactions within agriculture value chains.
Mobile banking (m-banking) is the same service as m-money, except the sender’s m-wallet is linked to a bank account and the receiver’s may be as well. (The term is also used for a variety of more basic services such as checking account balances and transferring funds between accounts.)
M-banking is one in an array of ICT tools that financial institutions are using to extend financial services to current (and sometimes new) customers to increase convenience for customers and reduce transaction costs for the financial institutions.
It is one of several approaches to “branchless banking”, which include other tools such as ATM s, POS (point of sale) terminals, and electronic bank cards.
In developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere, m-money and m-banking have leveraged the dramatic increases in access to affordable cell phone services.
Security for m-money and m-banking transactions is paramount for the customer as well as for a country’s financial sector. There are a variety of proven approaches to security available, depending on the types of cell phones being used.
They include ones based on SMS (short message services); the SIM cards in each phone; and USSD (unstructured supplementary service data), which is a featureof the cell phone network itself.
Given the plethora of m-money and m-banking initiatives being rolled out across developing countries especially, there are a variety of proven technical platforms (that is, the software needed to run such systems).
M-money/banking and agriculture
Where agriculture development projects find access to financial services a key constraint to success, m-money and m-banking services are potentially important tools to leverage.
Such services can:
Make it cheaper and easier for smallholder farmers to save; receive loans and make loan payments;
Make it
lleasier for input suppliers to collect and manage payments from smallholder farmers—and small-holder farmers, in turn, can use m-money and other ICT tools to aggregate their demand for inputs and pay for them;
Make it easier and safer for traders to manage transactions and make deposits into their bank accounts;
Make it easier for large buyers to pay thou
llsands of producers faster (and reduce side selling) and manage any credit they offer such producers;
Make payments for micro-insurance and receive any pay outs from such insurance;
Increase the efficiency and reliability of any voucher services for fertilizer or other inputs provided by a government, an NGO or a donor project; and
Perhaps an important indirect benefit of mmoney is to enable producers and others in the value chain to more easily and cheaply receive remittances domestically and internationally — critical assets to help with cash flow.
So far, m-money and m-banking initiatives have not scaled widely in most countries, and there are few actual examples of agriculture development projects using them to improve success.
There are notable exceptions though. In Kenya, M-Pesa is being used in many ways by smallholder farmers and others in the agriculture sector. — Staff Writer/FAO / USA id)
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