This project seeks to understand the potential for digital financial services (DFS) to help improve financial access among the agricultural midstream—which includes traders, transporters, processors, wholesalers, and other related businesses. While academics, development practitioners, and others have been placing increased attention on the agricultural midstream, little is known about their present financial needs. Improving the function of the agricultural midstream can potentially increase employment creation while also improving incomes of farmers upstream and offering more affordable prices to consumers downstream.
This project is being conducted in two phases. In the first phase, the research team has conducted consultations with a wide range of academic and practitioner experts to be able to better characterize needs in the sector, and these consultations have been accompanied by a critical review of contributions to the existing academic and policy literature. Finally, the team has reanalyzed some existing data sources to learn more about the agricultural midstream.
The second phase of the project will focus on two countries, Uganda and Bangladesh. In consultation with local partners, the IFPRI team is going to select two value chains in each country to explicitly target midstream actors with tailored surveys aimed to understand their financial capabilities and constraints.
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