Mastercard and Ecobank Group have deployed Mastercard Farm Pass, an award-winning, innovative solution that helps connect smallholder farmers to financial and agricultural ecosystems.
Mastercard Farm Pass will be rolled out leveraging the 33 countries where Ecobank has banking operations, helping millions of smallholder farmers gain digital access to markets, quality inputs, financial services, and real-time pricing information.
According to McKinsey, more than 60% of the population of Sub-Saharan Africa are smallholder farmers, with the agricultural sector contributing an estimated 23% of the continent’s GDP. Yet only 3% of the sector receives banking credit, limiting the farmers’ capacity to grow their business or mitigate poor harvest losses.
Empowering smallholder farmers means empowering the African continent
By integrating farmers’ businesses with payment systems, Farm Pass will enable smallholder farmers to build a digital transaction record that can facilitate formal credit or other financial services from banks and other financial institutions, says Ade Ayeyemi, CEO of Ecobank Group
“Food security is a critical and urgent need in these times. Therefore, we must rise to the task by creating growth opportunities across the agriculture value chain in Africa. Our partnership with Mastercard has come at the right time to accelerate smallholder farmers’ access to urgently needed financial services, which are vital to realizing Africa’s full agricultural potential. It will also help deliver value across the farming and agricultural value chain to make farming in Africa more profitable, competitive, and resilient, thus contributing to the economic growth of the continent.”
Ade Ayeyemi
Michael Froman, Vice Chairman and President, Strategic Growth at Mastercard, said empowering smallholder farmers means empowering the African continent.
“When we empower people, we can power economies and support economic growth that is truly inclusive. Mastercard Farm Pass contributes to this by offering a digital platform that makes it easier for smallholder farmers to move from subsistence to commercial farming. This, in turn, will stimulate agricultural growth, increase competitiveness, and improve food security in Africa. Through close collaborations with important partners like Ecobank, we can create even more impact, putting the digital economy to work for everyone, everywhere.”
Michael Froman
Mastercard Farm Pass and the Africa Emergency Food Production Facility are similar
Michael Froman, dislcosed that the Mastercard Farm Pass collaboration with Ecobank Group fits well with the intent of the African Development Banks’s recently approved Africa Emergency Food Production Facility (AEFPF), which is to support countries to boost production and productivity on the continent for key staples.
“One of the key activities of AEFPF is to connect farmers through e-wallet systems, i.e. digitizing the procurement of agro inputs and at the same time allowing for reaching farmers in a transparent manner, which will truly revolutionize the transformation of agriculture,” says Michael Froman.
Farm Pass is part of Mastercard’s strategy to connect underserved communities to essential services through Community Pass, a shared interoperable digital platform that supports the company’s commitment to connect one billion people and 50 million small and micro businesses to the digital economy by 2025.
Mastercard and Ecobank Group have partnered to connect millions of smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa through Mastercard’s Farm Pass – a digital platform that makes it safer and easier for farmers to sell their produce at a fair price.
READ ALSO: Safeguard Agricultural Lands to Realize SDG Goals- GAWU to Gov’t
