Coffee farmers in rural Uganda are among the poorest in the country, lacking in adequate exposure and familiarity to financial health tools and services like bank accounts and loan products. Often, these types of tools are out of reach for the poor, who can’t afford to pay the high fees or spend time travelling to distant, unwelcoming banking institutions. However, over the last decade mobile money has begun to shift the paradigm surrounding digital finances, as mobile network operators (think Verizon, AT&T) now have mobile wallets attached to every phone number—so as long as you have an active SIM card and a phone, you can load, send, and receive mobile money.

This has a lot of implications; the most practical of which assures that the majority of Ugandans—regardless of socioeconomic status—now have access to this more open form of digital finance, and with more use and exposure, can develop the confidence to use other, more advanced services that contribute towards poverty alleviation.

It was necessary to prioritize and establish safeguards for the most common issues staff members experienced, like forgetting their username and password (takes 3 days to reset), running out of mobile money (up to a week to top-up), and workflow being halted when there’s no network connection. To address the issue of network connection, I added a ‘Payment Queue’ feature that could be accessed from each screen, where staff could store payments until the connection was strong enough. On top of this, the interface was designed with intentionally high-contrast to maintain readability when the sun is bright, large text fields and otherwise fairly minimal layouts in order to reduce visual clutter.

The most persistent issue faced by both staff and farmers was the uncertain, lengthy processing time of mobile payments—in part due to the fact that staff members had no visibility into what was going on behind the scenes and therefore weren’t able to give farmer a time estimation. We designed a ‘Pending Payments’ feature that gives staff members visibility into the precise progress of payments and clear error messages to help them better communicate issues with farmers. An additional part of my role was working with our Ugandan development partner to prioritize backlog issues that would move us closer to our goal of making mobile payments faster than cash. Over the course of several sprints, we’ve been able to move the needle from 1-6 hours to 5-15 minutes, and are still working to achieve our reach goal of a ~2 minute average.

The location was critical, as it’s proximity to the station removes the time and hassle for farmers to travel to more distant markets or village merchants. This not only reduces the cost of roundtrip travel, but also valuable time—time that could be better spent harvesting more coffee or otherwise strengthening farming businesses.

We recruited local farmers to own and operate the Mo’Agro prototype, leveraging existing trust in farmer communities. We equipped these managers with starting inventory, receipt books to document mobile money sales, as well as bold, cohesive brand assets to support and legitimize the shop. Ultimately, we aimed to establish an immediate, trusted, and safe environment for farmers to learn how to use mobile money to pay for goods and services.

To supplement the class curriculum, we designed several dozen iterations of an activity worksheet that would serve as a long term reminder of the goals farmer’s had set in class. Due to low literacy levels, we focused on making each activity highly, if not entirely visual—which was challenging as it was coupled with the fact that these worksheets eventually needed to be sourced and printed as simply as possible. When viability was less of a focus, we kicked off the session with a visioning exercise; asking farmers to cut out and collage images of goals they had an emotional connection to—e.g. a cow to generate supplementary income to pay my daughter’s school fees. In rolling out our longer term prototype, we adapted the activity such that farmers could identify their goal by coloring in line illustrations. This small change significantly reduced the cost of production, while still maintaining the interactive, highly visual nature of the worksheet.

In January 2017, we tested our first comprehensive class prototype in three classes, making up about 40 KCL farmers total. We’ve since been doing qualitative follow-ups to inform updates and changes—i.e. to see what was working, where more guidance was needed, and what behavioral changes were happening if any. Out of the eight in-depth follow ups we’ve made since then, three have successfully saved up for the goal they set at the beginning of the year with mobile money! These three were all women, adding proof to an early insight we had—that Ugandan women are typically more consistent and goal-oriented than men.