The combination of COVID-19 disruptions and the widening digital divide in the rural and underserved communities has threatened the attainment of financial inclusion targets in Nigeria.
Over 65 percent of Nigerians are estimated to be outside the financial services envelope, with millions of unbanked or underbanked.
But, through the partnership between Releaf, a raw material procurement & logistics platform that is making it easy for crops to move from farm to factory, and Onepipe, a digital gateway enabling financial services, over 2,000 oil palm farmers in Cross River and Akwa Ibom states now have access to digitized financial services.
This partnership between Releaf and Onepipe is thus a welcome initiative to the National Financial Inclusion Strategy and provides opportunities for thousands of rural farmers across Nigeria’s SouthSouth region.
“Since inception, Releaf has empowered over 1,000 farmers to supply over 10 million kilograms of quality crops to various food factories. While disbursements to our farmers have been largely cash-based, we now have access to digitized fund disbursement via embedded, customised accounts, provisioned by Onepipe, to drive financial inclusion of previously financially excluded farmers in the digital economy,” Speaking on the collaboration, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer for Releaf, Uzoma Ayogu, said.
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As a result, Ayogu said, its company can provide increased funding to farmers in a more seamless, scalable, and safe manner.
“We are also exploring other products like insurance and other services leveraging Onepipe’s infrastructure and strategic partnerships with an array of Financial Institutions.”
Releaf, a raw material procurement & logistics platform that makes it easy for crops to move from farmer to factory to consumer through the fragmented African food system is a company that uses software to identify & buy crops from smallholder farmers and proprietary hardware to lightly process the crops so they can be
ready for sale. The company works with over 2000 farmers in Eastern Nigeria, moving 200 tonnes of crops per week, with a team of 60 people & growing.
Compared to the USA which spends 10 percent of disposable income on food, Nigeria spends over 55 percent. The country’s inefficient food chains and significant centralisation creates a need for a more efficient, scalable and decentralised food system that can feed the expected population of 400m by 2050.
According to Releaf, it is committed to building the efficient food systems necessary for the future and enabling the economic empowerment of millions of Africans by driving down the cost of food.
Explaining how the partnership benefits the users, Releaf said the embedded customised accounts for the farmers are provisioned leveraging Onepipe’s partner bank APIS and are opened and operated via USSD and *PWA (Progressive Web App) channels and branded as Releaf Wallet for ease of adoption by the farmers.
As full-utility accounts, farmers can receive inflow from any bank/ channel and can transfer funds to any Nigerian bank account; they can also access readily available services such as airtime top-up (self and third party), savings/investments and various loan options.
The loan options are configured such that consistent usage of the Releaf wallet by the farmers results in a correspondingly increasing credit line, the company explained.
Onepipe’s Founder and Chief Plumber, Ope Adeoye described the partnership with Releaf as “an exciting opportunity to co-create value with Releaf. Releaf is reviving agricultural infrastructure and crafting a sustainable path to prosperity for farmers who previously did not have commensurate return for their labour”.
According to him, “working with Releaf was inevitable as the company’s vision to transform Africa’s agricultural future by making decentralized food processing scaleable coincides with Onepipe’s social mandate to drive financial inclusion through technology for all – including the 700M+ smallholder farmers on the continent.”
Onepipe’s platform provides a single gateway that aggregates financial services from industry leaders and combines them in unique ways to create new brand propositions that help organisations reduce time to market by embedding financial services within their products.
The Lagos-based Fintech company is at the vanguard of the embedded finance movement in SubSaharan Africa and has assisted companies like Releaf to provide seamless digital financial services to their partners.
In addition to the ongoing partnership with Releaf, Onepipe is also working with key players in the Retail, FMCG and Asset Management space to facilitate embedded finance within their existing offerings.
