Our Solution
Seeds as a loan to female smallholders in rural Uganda.
One woman receives 10kg of bean seeds as a loan. She plants the seeds in her field, where they grow to ~100kg of beans within three months. After the harvest the woman gives back ~20kg of her beans to Seedloans as an in-kind repayment. She uses the remaining ~80kg to feed her family, sell an extra on the market or replant beans for the next season.
We offer 5kg, 10kg, 15kg and 20kg options to farmers – enough to cover 1 acre of land, the typical field size of a smallholder.
A Holistic Solution
Joining the programme
Payback and market access
Depending on her choice of kg of seeds, a woman will harvest 100kg to 200kg of beans to feed her family, to sell or to replant. Then each woman returns between 15kg and 30kg of beans to Seedloans. The payback is based on the choices of inputs and complementary services, and covers the costs of the products plus operational costs. To offer farmers further possibilities to increase their income and incentivise them ro repay the loan, we offer the women to sell part of their additional harvest for fair market prices directly to us.
Digitally enabled scaling
To be able to effectively scale our programm, while staying in close contact with our farmers we use several digital solutions to support the core program. Through an SMS bulk-system we are able to communicate with each farmer individually. Currently, we are piloting with smartphones for one chosen farmer per group to intensify the contact and the support we can offer that group in case of agricultural problems. Finally, with Salesforce we receive a pro-bono CRM system that tracks all our farmers individually and helps us to best scale the program while being able to Zoom in on each farmer.
