ADC, Rabobank Foundation and Laboremus Uganda are happy to announce a partnership to help Uganda’s dairy farmers and cooperatives grow.

The three parties are signing an agreement today to bring Emata to even more dairy farmers and cooperatives in Uganda. As part of the agreement, Rabobank Foundation will support the continuous development of the Emata solution. Moreover, ADC-supported cooperatives will get access, training and support for the Emata solution.

Emata makes managing a cooperative easy. The solution unravels administrative clutter, increases transparency and turns risky bulk cash transactions into safe one-click digital payments. On top of this, Emata provides greatly needed insight into daily operations. This helps farmers and cooperatives make better and more informed decisions.

Through Emata, ADC cooperatives will gather information about the productivity of their farmers, as well as understand which farmers are performing well and which require more training. Emata also facilitates communication between the cooperative and the farmers, and settle payments based on daily prices. As Emata can be operated offline, it even works in areas with fluctuating data connectivity.

“Laboremus is excited to partner with the Rabobank Foundation and ADC, two organizations that share our vision for the potential and future of the agricultural sector in Africa. Through smart use of both technology and field training, we believe that this partnership will build a foundation on which cooperatives and farmers can grow stronger, more efficient and prosperous,” says Bram van den Bosch, Managing Director of Laboremus.

ABOUT EMATA

Laboremus launched Emata in 2017 with a vision to provide affordable loans to farmers across East Africa. Agricultural financing in Africa does not work. Drastic changes and new thinking are needed to realize Africa’s vast agricultural potential. Interest rates are often more than 50% per year, which prohibits farmers from using loans to invest in their farms.

Emata’s ambition is to become the first fully-digital, agricultural bank in Africa. With Emata, we reduce interest rates by doing three things differently compared to expensive incumbent lenders: we use end-to-end digital processes, run risk analytics on each farmer backed by live data and have cooperatives at the heart of our model.

ABOUT AGRIBUSINESS DEVELOPMENT CENTRE (ADC)

The Agribusiness Development Centre (ADC), was set up by the Rabobank Foundation and DFCU bank with the sole purpose of training Farmer-Based Organizations (FBOs) and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Agribusiness. ADC exists to support Farmer Based Organizations (FBOs) that have the potential to contribute to the agricultural value chain but currently lack the organizational or technical/structural capacity to operate in a sustainable way.

ABOUT RABOBANK FOUNDATION

Rabobank Foundation is Rabobank’s social fund. The Foundation invests in the self-sufficiency of farmer organizations in Africa, Asia and Latin America, by putting up finance and by sharing the cooperative, banking and agricultural expertise that the Rabobank Group has built up over many years. This helps organizations to achieve their goals of offering small-scale farmers access to financing, savings opportunities, knowledge and new markets. In addition, new technological developments can be deployed to help serve our target group – small farmers – even more effectively. Digitization is , therefore,a key focus for Rabobank Foundation and consists of a combination of four data streams: field information from the farmer, chain information, geodata and the use of fintech such as a mobile savings account and credit scoring. This fits seamlessly into the mission Growing a better world together, in which Rabobank Group wants to tackle the world food supply challenges with the help of knowledge and innovation. Read more about our Rabobank Foundation at www.rabobankfoundation.com.