At Vocoa We've Got One Main Concern: Financial Inclusion For All Cocoa Farmers

Play the video below to see how we're empowering Farmers today for a better tomorrow

The Problem

Many West African cocoa farmers live in a seemingly endless cycle of abject poverty.
We've identified a few reasons for this.

lack of capital

Many Cocoa Farmers in Ghana & Ivory Coast live on only 40 cents a day. These stringent conditions make capital intensive farming investments such as cultivating more land, buying new machinery or employing more workers difficult.

limited finance schemes

Most cocoa farmers are considered unbankable and therefore ineligible for loans. Reasons for this are cited as Lack of land use rights, little or no collateral, lack of financial documentation or literacy, and a lack of access to formal finance.

Lack of financial records

Farmers see almost no incentives for opening bank accounts due to the lack of loan schemes and similar programs. This however causes problems as it leaves them without a record of their financial activities, should financing schemes actually come their way.

limited financial literacy

Limited access to education and a subsistence mind-set have contributed to low financial literacy amongst small-holder farmers This lack of financial awareness positions the farmers in a constant cycle of poverty.

language barrier

Most farmers are not conversant in English, this proves to be a hindrance when creating solutions for farmers. Technical or non-technical engagement of farmers in any solution will need to tackle this barrier first.

Low Levels of Education

Education opens the mind of farmers to knowledge, provides training and better methods of farming. Which helps the farmer yeild more profit. Lack of education has hindered millions of farmers from growing financially and socially.

The Solution

Intuitive Voice Prompts

Vocoa enables an interaction in the local dialect between the system voice menus or customer care agents and the farmers.

Monitor Cash Flow

Vocoa collects data on the farmers’ expenditure and revenue to monitor cash flow and provide insights on how to maximise profit.

Maintain Financial Records

Cash flow is monitored to gather Financial records which will serve as future reference in respect to loan applications for farmers.

Receive Vocal Reports

Vocoa works within the tight margins of low literacy levels among African farmers. This context is the basis for its Voice operated services which are in English and other respective local languages.

Our Data Provides A Huge Data Ware House. We Use This Big Data To Provide Analytics.

We Use The data to assist stakeholders in the cocoa industry in helping improve the lives of cocoa farmers.

Machine Learning For Farming Communities

Information collected through Vocoa will be processed and analysed using Artificial Intelligence techniques to provide optimum service to farmers & farmer communities.

Financial Insights For Cocoa Stakeholders

Researchers, Government Institutions and stakeholders in the cocoa industry will have access to insights for various farming sample groups from a variety of parameters developed by our data analytics team. These insights will be used by these actors to further improve the cocoa value chain, especially the lives of cocoa farmers

The Technology

We Use a Combination of Big Data & SQL Technolgies to Make Vocoa Work Effectively

Hadoop

All farmer data will be stored using Hadoop utilizing the Hadoop Distributed File System, MapReduce and associated technology to enable storage, mining, machine learning & analytics of data.

SQL

Due to the nature of financial data which is stored in a tabular form using rows and columns, the financial data of our farmers is stored in SQL tables to ensure compatibility of the data structures with the application domain.

SQL-On-Hadoop

SQL's tabular structure and NoSQL style of Hadoop are incompatible, hence we employ SQL-On-Hadoop technologies such as Apache Hive, this allows the financial data to be analyzed in tandem with all the peripheral data.