irrigation

Drop by Drop Gets the Pump: KickStart’s Mobile Layaway Service for Small-Scale Farmers

Posted by MelissaUlbricht on Oct 06, 2010

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Drop by Drop Gets the Pump: KickStart’s Mobile Layaway Service for Small-Scale Farmers data sheet 6195 Views

Update: In July 2011, KickStart reached a milestone by registering its 100th mobile layaway customer. (When we last chatted with Chen, KickStart had 9 such customers.) The group is preparing to launch the service across Kenya next month.

Basic Information
Website URL: 
http://www.kickstart.org/
Organization involved in the project?: 
KickStart
Project goals: 

The goal of the KickStart mobile layaway service is to provide a safe, secure, and convenient savings mechanism for small-scale farmers to put away money for an irrigation pump.

Brief description of the project: 

The mobile layaway service allows small-scale farmers to make incremental payments over a mobile phone by leveraging M-PESA, a mobile banking platform that is popular in Kenya and elsewhere. Farmers work toward the purchase of KickStart irrigation pumps.

Target audience: 

The target audience of the KickStart mobile layaway service is small-scale famers who wish to purchase an irrigation pump but have difficulty in gathering the total purchase cost at one time. Farmers must also have access to a mobile phone and be registered M-PESA users.

 

Detailed Information
Length of Project (in months) : 
5
Status: 
Ongoing
What worked well? : 

The mobile layaway service is successful in it’s approach: it offers a formalized service by building upon something done informally and it leverages a trusted brand that users have access to and are comfortable with.

What did not work? What were the challenges?: 

Though the USB modem and text message interface alleviates the need to administer data via a handset, the process still requires significant manual input. For the pilot, received payments come in automatically from the M-PESA admin tool, but on the back-end, an Excel spreadsheet is used to track customers and payments.