This project explored the social impact of mobile money services among tea Savings and Credit Co-operatives (SACCOs) members in Rwanda, following the implementation of a payment automation project funded by Access to Finance Rwanda (AFR). In this project, banking operations of two SACCOs were automated and integrated with a mobile money platform, Tigo-Cash. This integration aimed to help the SACCO members to access their money through the mobile money platform and reduce the time farmers and pickers spent visiting their SACCOs to receive their wages and salaries in cash. It was envisaged that both farmers and pickers would spend more time working on the tea farms and this would improve their productivity in terms of the amount of tea delivered to the factory, as well as the quality of tea delivered.
Impact / Outcome Mobile money systems streamline payments throughout the entire tea supply chain, most notably between SACCOs and tea farmers and pickers. Salary payment previously took days to weeks to complete for large SACCOs and inefficiently wasted the time of all involved in order to get SACCO members paid each month. Payment via mobile wallets has increased time efficiency as well as administration and accounting efficiency for SACCOs. When all systems are online and working properly, payment between SACCO-farmer-picker is seamless, however issues of network and software problems often prevent this from happening, particularly in Rusizi where connectivity is unreliable. The removal of fees during the COVID-19 lockdown period in Rwanda was beneficial to farmers and pickers and significantly increased mobile money use, as a majority of respondents previously reported avoiding mobile money in part because of high transaction fees.
Funding sources Public/Private
Key Metrics Implementation of a payment automation system integrated with a mobile money platform for farmers and pickers
