Using Mobile Tech to Shape Smallholder Farming in Rwanda

Until about two years ago, our field staff served close to a million farmers through weekly group meetings, in which roughly 40 or so farmers would congregate for agricultural training and to order farming supplies. In 2020, we rolled out the use of USSD (a text messaging-based service available on basic mobile phones), through which our customers could get services straight from their phones. USSD functions are important tools that give farmers access to farming and market information and allow them to sign up for products and services.

This year in Rwanda alone, over 600,000 farmers enrolled for farm supplies and other products, like trees and solar lights, using USSD, demonstrating the scale of its adoption and the pivotal role that simple technology can play in farming.

By enabling farmers to self-enroll through USSD with limited assistance from a field officer, we are augmenting our staff’s management capacity to several hundred farmers as we look to achieve our aim of working with 10 million farmers by 2030 across Sub-Saharan Africa.