hiveonline and the Association of Women in Agriculture in Kenya (AWAK) have partnered up to explore digitalisation of Women’s agricultural groups.
The goal of this joint collaboration is to build the capacity of women and young farmers, through the use of digital platforms, increasing access to finance and becoming informed decision makers and key industry players.
The AWAK – hiveonline partnership aims to begin the roll out of the hiveonline mycoop.online application to groups in the AWAK network. This will provide the groups with a financial identity and access to finance opportunities. The mycoop platform creates a reputation score based on commitments and transactions, encouraging best practices in agriculture, which are validated through the data collected.
As production plans and transactions are recorded through the app, both individual users and groups themselves build a financial history and reputation that can then be shared with financial institutions. As the reputation score becomes more mature through platform usage, groups are able to unlock access to formal credit and lending to purchase inputs for agricultural or other community-led businesses via linkages to FIs and MFIs. Implementing partners and field agents are able to receive real-time data on association activities to monitor group progress without the need for in-person visits through the hiveonline dashboard.
Green finance and sustainability is important for both AWAK and hiveonline. The programme aims to build incentive programs for the farmers, encouraging carbon sequestration through sustainable land use and best practices, which are then validated and contribute towards the farmers’ reputation score.
Through this exciting partnership, both AWAK and hiveonline will have opportunities to provide a valuable platform and opportunities for the associations of women farmers in Kenya. We are planning to launch partnership programs that are beneficial to our farmers and end users. Stay tuned for it!
The Association of Women in Agriculture in Kenya (AWAK) is a national organisation building capacity for small scale women in agriculture, to become informed decision makers and key industry players. AWAK has a presence in 47 counties in Kenya and focuses on four key areas: Productivity (capacity around production, climate resilience); Value addition; Market linkage and Financial Inclusion; and Advocacy.