Hive Online's Digital Cooperatives in Africa
Description
"Hiveonline is a company facilitating access to credit for farming communities in Mozambique, Zambia and Kenya. (They are) developing three types of solutions: the digitization of vouchers, especially food vouchers, issued by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the creation of digital savings groups, and the creation and management of online agricultural cooperatives." [1]
Sofie Blackstad:
"Hiveonline’s digital cooperatives work on the same principle as savings groups, but are larger in size.
In effect, they allow farmers to have more bargaining power against exporters and middlemen, so they can charge higher prices. Thanks to this system, farmers have been able to increase their prices by 12%. The cooperatives rely on the same digital identity systems as the savings groups. There are 70,000 farmers in 3,000 digital cooperatives that we have created. Members of cooperatives also hold a digital registry. So most farmers are members of savings groups and cooperatives, because they are complementary devices. Thus, recording transactions in a digital register facilitates the financial inclusion of populations, by demonstrating the dynamism of farmers’ activities. Micro-credit institutions are among the main lenders to farmers, as well as larger banks, particularly in Kenya. For example, $50,000 in loans were made to farmers through Hiveonline. We also encourage farmers to reach out to members of their supply chain, so there is an incentive for both farmers and international buyers to have their farmers increase their production, and therefore their income. This allows for innovative forms of loans, which are repaid by farmers in cashew nuts, not in cash. This allows farmers to avoid the economic risks of hypothetical repayment due to lack of liquidity. In the long term, we imagine building a digital bartering platform, based on tokenized* goods that would be exchanged with each other, without money, according to a system of automatically calculated equivalences."