The University of Nottingham received a prestigious grant from the Royal Academy of Engineering to research the most effective practices to improve the financial education of coffee farmers in Uganda.
Experts from the university’s Inclusive Financial Technology Research Center (INFINITY) are collaborating with the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF), Rural Inclusion and Agri Evolve.
The project will evaluate an innovative digital financial education program targeting underserved rural communities in the Rwenzori region of Uganda. It will also inform farmers about climate change and potential mitigations they might consider.
Agri Evolve, a family business working with a network of more than 15,000 smallholder coffee farmers in the Rwenzori region, will offer a financial education program to 360 coffee farmers, who will be divided equally into three control groups, each with a method different learning.
One group will use the Ostrii platform delivered by a local agent, another will use the Ostrii platform via self-study/group, and the final group will use a traditional manual with similar content.
The Ostrii platform is an offline mobile application designed to be used by rural agents to deliver financial insights in the form of animated stories in local languages. Ostrii was developed by Rural Inclusion, a UK-based social enterprise driving economic development in rural communities in Africa and Latin America.
Once the program has been delivered, researchers from the University of Nottingham and Agri Evolve field staff will track the performance of each control group, looking at behavior change and the adoption and use of formal financial products. .
The project falls under one of INFINITY’s key research themes: Inclusive Financial Services which focuses on how society can increase financial inclusion and use the power of financial technology for good.
Professor Meryem Duygun, project leader, said: “This project is strongly connected to the research we are doing at INFINITY.
Our work in Africa will enhance our understanding of how financial inclusion and technology can be used to benefit society by promoting sustainable economic growth and quality education, strengthening resilience and adaptive capacity to disasters related to the climate, and the creation of knowledge and capacities to face climate changes. change.
Professor Duygun continued: “I am delighted that our network and partnerships with UNCDF and two exciting social enterprises, Rural Inclusion and Agri Evolve, have resulted in a strong bid that successfully secured funding from such a prestigious funder.”
We are excited to launch this project to investigate the impact of our Ostrii platform for coffee farmers in Uganda who do not have access to smartphones and the internet. We believe that our approach to education by focusing on the use of animation in local languages is not only relevant to local communities, but also standardized, engaging, and accessible to those with low levels of literacy.
The Nottingham experts believe that the success of this project will lead to more large-scale research of this kind in other African countries, thus providing a scalable solution to educate smallholder farmers in vulnerable communities about financial and climate risk management.
The project is financed by the ‘Frontiers Seed Funding’ of the Royal Academy of Engineering of the ‘Frontiers Programme’.
The project team is made up of academics and practitioners: Professor Meryem Duygun and Dr Tian Han (University of Nottingham), Stephen Waiswa (UNCDF), Jack Farren and Joseph Lukwago (Rural Inclusion) and Beth Rowland and Agnes Kerora (Agri evolve).
