Zanaco and Musika today signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for the development and roll-out of the bank’s AgriPay Digital Banking Platform aimed at benefiting smallholder farmers in underserved areas.
The AgriPay Digital Banking Platform is expected to meet the various needs of all agricultural value chain actors and will create an enabling ecosystem to support smallholder farmer growth in Zambia. The AgriPay platform offers a holistic customer value proposition that includes a savings, micro-credit and agronomic information via a USSD platform.
Agripay, therefore, will help to address key challenges affecting smallholder farmers such as access to affordable credit, access to markets, access to quality and timely inputs, and access to knowledge and networks resulting in improved productivity and income across various crop value chains.
Additionally, the platform presents key growth opportunities and creates employment for small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) including agro-dealers, aggregators and off-takers to earn and diversify their revenue streams by becoming merchant Xpress Agents to earn income on commission basis.
Under the MOU, Musika will provide financial support valued at US$56,000 for training, marketing and Business Development Consultancy needed to establish the necessary structures and processes on various components of the work, so as to ensure the platform’s long-term commercial viability and scalability by Zanaco.
“Zanaco views Musika’s support towards this initiative as critical to catalyzing the long-term development of the AgriPay business model, at a time when it is being refined to fully meet the Zambian market needs. We are confident that the AgriPay Digital Banking Platform has a high probability of being a pioneering solution that unlocks the potential and growth for Zambia’s entire digital financial landscape,” said Zanaco Chief Digital Banking officer, Wane Ng’ambi.
Musika’s support aims to mitigate some of the upfront risks associated with developing the AgriPay Digital Banking platform by Zanaco in readiness for the market, thus increasing its chances of long-term expansion and replication in Zambia and other markets.
“This initiative speaks to our overall strategy which supports partners in the financial sector to develop and test financial models that are currently not present in the market, carry high levels of risk or are not immediately commercially viable without some form of incubation support. Interventions in this area aim at improving access by smallholders and small rural agribusinesses to a range of agricultural financial services to grow and protect both farming and business enterprises,” said Musika Managing Director, Reuben Banda.
NEWS CREDIT MUSIKA