In Kenya’s Rift Valley, digital tools means less guesswork, more ground gained for this female farmer

Each morning, Kenyan farmer Dorcas Mengich recieves a ping from nearby Ainabkoi Farmers Co-operative Society informing her that their trucks  have arrived to collect the milk produced on her farm,  a six-hour drive northwest from Nairobi, in the fertile, nutrient-rich volcanic soil of Kenya’s Rift Valley.

“When I got training on digital tools, I saw improvements,” says Mengich. “Before, I used to be in the dark, you just speculated.”

The digital tool that Uasin Gishu County cooperative uses to connect its rural and often underserved farmers is provided by Mastercard’s Community Pass. This platform digitizes interactions among the agricultural ecosystem, including farmers, cooperatives, buyers, and financial institutions.

It’s designed to enable smallholder farmers like Mengich to find new buyers and get the equipment they need to increase their farm production and earnings. And for farmers with little formal credit history, Community Pass records the transaction and production data that can help them become more visible to lenders, helping assess them for loans to buy fertilizers, animal feed and even parcels of land. 

“It is a lack of access to credit that confines growth across the agricultural value chain, whether at the farmer level, at the farmer cooperative level, or at the buyer level,” says Tara Nathan, Mastercard’s executive vice president for Growth Segments and the founder of Community Pass.

That’s particularly important for women farmers, who comprise nearly 43% of the global agricultural labor force and produce between 60% and 80% of the food in most developing countries, according to research by the United Nations’s Food and Agriculture Association. Not only do they often shoulder heavy domestic burdens, many lack equal access to land and finance.

Alongside the potatoes, maize and passionfruit she grows, Mengich now wants to improve her herd’s milk production by building barns and getting the feed she needs to raise cattle indoors alongside the smallholding’s lush fields.

With her production and sales recorded through Community Pass, she hopes this data will help her secure loans to grow her income and pay for her children’s school fees. One day, she wants to buy more land to expand her farming business.

“Women carry many burdens. For credits and grants, women should be prioritized,” she says. “If society supports women, they will rise.”