With the support of Impact Amplifier, GreenFingers Mobile (GFM) has secured additional funding from seed funder, Hivos Food & Lifestyle Fund in the Netherlands.
New Chief Executive Officer Natalie Miller brings over a dozen years of experience leading and scaling impact-driven organisations across Africa.
The additional investment enables GFM to onboard the new CEO, bring on a Digital Product Consultant and further enhance its system while building internal capacity.
Keith Wallace, Senior Investment Manager at Hivos Food & Lifestyle Fund says, “We are excited to again invest in GFM to allow it to achieve its ongoing mission to help smallholder farmers with a scalable technology solution that creates real impact in Southern Africa.”
Natalie has joined the GFM team to help the company execute on its mission to improve the livelihood of smallholder farmers (SHFs), support and measure sustainable agricultural practices and to enable a transparent supply chain. “I am excited to bring GFM to the next level and capitalize on the learnings from our existing client base. We have an exciting vision for our future product which we will begin developing in-house”, Miller says.
Building on the current system, the focus of GFM moving forward is on additional functionalities, a more sophisticated social and environmental impact assessment component and the ability to incorporate third-party micro-finance players. Funders and supply-chain operators are posing increasing demands on Agricultural SMEs to report on various aspects of the impact of their programmes. By combining smart survey data with transactional data, GFM aims to help these organizations with measuring their true impact and streamlining their reporting.
Currently, the agricultural SMEs’ are left with having to provide in-kind loans or inputs on credit as many SHFs can’t afford the upfront costs. GFM will enable SHFs access to credit directly through third-party providers and will relieve the SMEs of this responsibility unlocking needed cash flow to support and grow their organizations such as including more SHFs into their scheme. For SHFs themselves, access to credit will no longer be limited to seeds and other inputs but also the opportunity to borrow money for other basic needs such as health, education or emergencies.