In Africa, women play a central role in agriculture. They constitute 49 percent of the agricultural workforce and play a significant role across the agricultural value chain, according to the FAO’s recent report.
Yet, that contribution does not always translate into equal access to the resources women need to farm and grow their businesses. Women own only two percent of titled land and receive less than 10% of the credit available for small businesses.
Women smallholder farmers also face gendered barriers that limit their control and agency over agricultural practices. These include restricted access to markets, financing, productive assets and knowledge, as well as legal constraints and restrictive socio-cultural norms.
These barriers shape how women participate in agriculture, from the markets they can reach and the finance they can access, to the decisions they can make about their farms and income.
This is where digital agriculture can make a difference. But reaching women with technology is only the starting point. The real opportunity lies in designing digital solutions that respond to the realities of women’s lives and livelihoods.
Digital platforms are becoming increasingly important for marketing products, accessing information, and acquiring new skills. Yet women are 29 percent less likely than men to use mobile internet, and an estimated 205 million women in Sub-Saharan Africa still lack access to digital tools according to GSMA.
From reaching women to designing for women
Through the AgriFin Digital Farmer II (ADF2) program, we at Mercy Corps Agrifin and our partners have been working to make digital agricultural and financial services more accessible and responsive to women.
The program has reached a cumulative 7.6 million registered farmers, surpassing its five-million target by 53.2%. Women account for 41% of users, exceeding the program’s 30% target, with more than 1.5 million women smallholder producers reached across Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Uganda and Tanzania.
These numbers matter. But reach is only part of the story.
The bigger question is what happens when women can use digital tools to find better markets, access finance, receive payments or make decisions about the income generated from their farms.
Across ADF2, women are not only using these services. Women are also building the agrifintech solutions behind them. For Mercy Corps AgriFin, our partners CoAmana and VunaPay are leading the change, led by two women agritech founders Hafsah Jumare and Gatwiri Njogu respectively, who are ensuring women smallholder farmers and women traders are not left behind.
The women building the solutions
Imagine delivering your coffee today and knowing that you may have to wait months before you can access the money it has earned.
Or imagine finding an opportunity to buy produce at a good price but having to let it pass because you do not have enough money to pay for it.
For many farmers and traders, these are not hypothetical problems. They are everyday decisions that can determine whether a business grows, stalls, or simply survives.
It was around challenges like these that two women began building very different solutions.
In Nigeria and Kenya, Hafsah Jumare, founder of CoAmana, was looking at the challenges facing farmers and traders trying to navigate fragmented markets. Information on prices and demand was not always easy to access, and even when an opportunity was there, access to finance could determine whether someone was able to take it.
Through the AgriFin Digital Farmer 2 program, Mercy Corps AgriFin partnered with CoAmana to strengthen the Amana Market platform, bringing market intelligence, digital financial services and other tools together in one place.
One of those tools is Amana Insights, an AI-powered market intelligence tool that gives farmers and traders information on pricing and demand. The platform was also made available in Hausa and Yoruba, while financial services were introduced through a partnership with VBank.
Technology only becomes meaningful when we see what someone can actually do with it.
Take Mary, a trader in Kayole, Kenya.
When she wants to buy produce such as tomatoes, she can use the platform to compare prices across different regions. When she finds the right opportunity but does not have enough capital to make the purchase, she can apply to access the produce on credit and repay within 14 days.
For Mary, the platform is not simply a digital tool. It gives her another way to make a business decision when she might otherwise have had to wait.
There is also another feature that has kept her engaged with the platform: a KES 100 cashback incentive. When Mary refers a trader to the platform and they sign up, she receives KES 100 for each sign-up.
Khadijat Adebola, a trader at JCity Market in Abuja, describes a similar shift. After being introduced to Amana Market, she accessed a loan that helped her strengthen her business. She was able to move her shop location, diversify her produce, and employ a trader to assist her.
Across the platform, more than 5,000 digital transactions were completed, with women accounting for 60% of them, around 3,000 transactions involving women farmers and traders.
Then there is Gatwiri Njogu in Kenya.
Her question was different: what happens after the farmer has done everything, right?
The coffee has been harvested. The milk has been delivered. The produce has reached the cooperative.
But the farmer still has to wait for the money.
Gatwiri, founder of VunaPay, calls delayed payment “the toothache in farming.” For some farmers, that wait can stretch from a month for dairy to six or even twelve months for coffee.
Life does not wait for the harvest cycle. School fees still have to be paid. A medical emergency cannot be postponed. A farmer may need money for input for the next season.
That is the gap VunaPay set out to address.
So, how does VunaPay actually work?
At the heart of the model is the digitization of agricultural cooperatives. At the point where a farmer delivers produce, whether at a cooperative or processing factory, VunaPay can integrate with IoT-enabled hardware, connecting delivery scales and registration systems to its digital network.
Instead of relying on manual paper ledgers, delivery information is captured digitally. When a farmer weighs their dairy, coffee or maize, the weight is recorded in real time. This creates a digital record of the transaction while reducing the administrative errors and inconsistencies that can come with manual record-keeping.
The process does not stop recording the delivery.
Once the production data enters the digital system, VunaPay’s software calculates a qualified payout amount based on the farmer’s recorded production and financial history. The system can track delivery records, reference historical data and account for amounts such as upfront credit, farm inputs or existing debts extended through the cooperative.
What emerges is a digital record of what the farmer is owed, creating a pathway to access money against the value of production before the final payment arrives.
For a farmer, that difference can be significant.
Under the partnership with Mercy Corps Agrifin,the platform has now onboarded 30 cooperatives and 30,000 smallholder farmers, but the journey has also shown that introducing a digital solution does not automatically remove the challenges that already exist within agricultural systems.
One of the major challenges VunaPay encountered was that many cooperatives did not have proper data on the farmers they work with. Without reliable farmer records, it becomes harder to demonstrate a farmer’s production history and access finance, leaving some cooperatives and farmers waiting longer for financial services.
There are also practical barriers to adopting digital solutions. Some cooperatives lack the resources needed to adapt to digital systems, including basic infrastructure such as reliable electricity to charge phones and keep digital tools running. Access to finance remains another challenge, including for VunaPay itself as it works to expand the solution.
These challenges are a reminder that digital agriculture is not only about putting technology in the hands of farmers. It also requires infrastructure, records, financing, and systems that allow those technologies to work in practice.
Through its partnership with Mercy Corps AgriFin, VunaPay has been testing how cooperative systems can move beyond simply recording transactions to actually helping farmers access financial services.
For Linah Too, a coffee farmer in Buchenge village, Kericho County, that means something very practical.
When Linah delivers her coffee, VunaPay records the transaction and sends her an SMS confirming the quantity. She can then access an advance against the value of her produce when she needs the money before her final coffee payment arrives.
“VunaPay has made it easier for me to access money from my coffee when I need it,” she says.
It is a simple sentence, but it captures something important about digital agriculture.
Sometimes innovation is not about introducing the most sophisticated technology. It is about solving the moment when a farmer needs to pay school fees, respond to an emergency, buy stock or keep a business moving , and the value of her own work is sitting somewhere in the agricultural value chain, out of reach.
It is also about recognizing that the barriers to making that possible can exist at every level, from the individual farmer to the cooperative serving them.
That is what makes the stories of Hafsah and Gatwiri particularly interesting.
They are not simply building technology for women farmers. They are building from an understanding of the problems women farmers, traders and businesses actually face.
Through ADF2, Mercy Corps AgriFin and its partners have incorporated gender-responsive approaches including gender-sensitive onboarding, digital literacy and training, alongside data systems that track women’s participation and use of digital services.
The Gender Transformative Toolkit, developed to support farmer-facing organizations, brings these lessons together through 17 practical tools designed to help organizations make digital technology work better for women in agriculture.
Because reaching women is important.
Designing with women in mind is what makes that reach meaningful.
Looking ahead
As the world marks the 2026 International Year of the Woman Farmer, the focus on women in agriculture is an opportunity to look beyond participation numbers and ask what meaningful inclusion actually looks like.
The experience of ADF2 offers one answer: listen to women, understand the barriers they face, design services around those realities, and measure whether those services are creating meaningful opportunities.
It also means recognizing women in all the roles they already play across agricultural systems – as farmers, traders, entrepreneurs, business owners and decisionmakers.
From Hafsah building digital market solutions in Nigeria and Kenya to Gatwiri tackling delayed payments for farmers in Kenya, and from Khadijat strengthening her trading business to Linah accessing the value of her coffee when she needs it, these stories show what can happen when digital agriculture is designed around the realities of the people it is meant to serve.
Women are already at the center of Africa’s agricultural economy. The opportunity now is to ensure that the systems, technologies, and financial services around them are built to reflect that reality.