Karandaaz Pakistan has partnered with GrowTech Services (www.growtechsol.com), to facilitate digitalized data-driven scientific-based agriculture practices in Pakistan and facilitate financial inclusion in the agricultural value chain.
Under its “Pilot to Scale” program, Karandaaz has committed a grant to GrowTech Services, testing the impact of digitization of traditional agricultural value chain, on two different crops. The project will foretake the development of an E-Commerce portal, connecting farmers and bulk buyers, and integrate the GrowTech app and e-commerce platform with various payment gateways. This partnership aims to increase the penetration of this App among farmers and promote usage of digital payments through the e-commerce platform.
When speaking about the importance of digitizing agricultural value chains, CEO Karandaaz Waqas ul Hasan said, “Pakistan seriously lags behind its peers in farm productivity. We need to approach complex agricultural value chains from all possible intervention points. Farmers, in general, are hesitant in adopting digital payments and technology due to the often-complicated procedures involved. As a result, their productivity and income has remained low. Digitizing payments will bring previously unbanked farmers within the formal financial sphere. The data collected from their spending patterns can then be used to create additional interventions.”
Mr. Shahnawaz Mahmood, Co-Founder GrowTech Services said: “Our focus is to enhance productivity and decrease input-costs for farmers with the objective to improve per acre yield which is important in an agrarian economy like Pakistan. For this purpose, we remain engaged with farmers throughout the crop cycle. We are excited to partner with Karandaaz to make agricultural commerce more efficient with better price discovery and promote digital payments in this sector while providing trainings to farmers. In future this will be useful to develop innovative credit scoring models based on new data points.”
This project, through its solutions, aims to resolve a multitude of problems that exist due to traditional agriculture value chains. The focus will remain on removing the gaps and inefficiencies while digitizing the agricultural value chains resulting in a higher economic activity for all actors of the value chain while also increasing financial inclusion of value chain actors and their use of digital payments.
