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Digitisation and the use of data have become crucial in bringing financial services to farmers in East Africa.

In this video, the second episode from GTR East Africa 2019 on the use of data for financial inclusion, Jenny Rafanomezana talks about how digitisation is helping farmers get better deals and access to financing, while giving buyers consistent access to quality produce.

Rafanomezana is the CEO of TruTrade, a social enterprise connecting smallholder farmers with global commodity buyers. It does so through its digital trading and payment platform that allows supply chain participants to view costs, analyse transaction viability and price setting, trigger payments and track produce from collection to delivery, while creating digital trading records.

But digitisation doesn’t always bring equal benefits to its users, Rafanomezana explains.

“There’s a lot of interest now in digitisation, and what we’ve seen is that you can just be digitising existing inefficiencies, and so we’ve been working on how to use digitisation to actually transform the way that markets work,” she says.

Find out more in the video below.

The first episode from GTR East Africa 2019, an interview with IBM, explores the use of alternative data such as purchase history and repayment data to better predict the creditworthiness of an SME. Watch it here.