Digital Financial Services Insights and Loan Repayment in Microfinance

The challenge of agricultural finance is to securely provide cost-effective financing to rural smallholder farmers with minimum risk of fraud and maximum accountability and transparency. Mobile money payments by farmers can provide the transactional volume economics for creating an ecosystem that can be subsequently leveraged on branchless banking distribution channel for mobile banking credit, savings and micro insurance products. Mobile money is simple, convenient, affordable and disruptively innovative. This study sought to fill the gap in the literature on financial inclusion insights by analysing the contribution of digital financial services among small scale dairy farmers in Nakuru County, Kenya. The study sample comprised of 165 dairy farmers borrowers from Micro Kenya, Focus group participants and key informants who were loan officers in MFIs, where purposive sampling methods was employed. Data was collected through questionnaire, focus groups, and key informant interviews and both qualitative and quantitative methods were used to analyse the data. The study findings made an attempt at predicting current and latent demand for the digital financial products through improve... Mehr