This paper tells the story of how the United Nations Mobile Money for the Poor (MM4P) team in Uganda worked with exporter Kyagalanyi Coffee Limited (KCL) to digitize one of the country’s most important cash crops: coffee. In addition to addressing the complex dynamics of digitizing agricultural value chains, the paper illustrates how seven organizations from different sectors embarked on a three-year journey to digitize Uganda’s coffee value chain. The solutions they built and lessons they learned have fueled the digitization of several other agricultural value chains in Uganda—particularly, tea, dairy, and maize. Their work helped to build a foundation that enables greater financial inclusion of smallholder farmers by increasing financial participation of farmers, traders, off-takers, and exporters in the formal economy.

For implementers and donors looking at agricultural value chain digitization, the KCL story provides insights into the operational challenges of digitizing a coffee value chain, especially in rural areas. It also helps implementers assess whether their market or value chain is ready for digitization, and if not, whether the lessons learned by UNCDF and KCL can help them reach this point.

The paper addresses several questions, including:

• Why digitize? Will it bring greater financial inclusion for the poor?
• What level of market readiness is needed to make this happen?
• How should a digitization solution be implemented?

This use case illustrates the efforts of UNCDF, KCL, and their partners to digitize one of Uganda’s coffee value chains. However, not all agriculture value chains are the same. For example, UNCDF discovered that the value chain for tea is very different from that of coffee. Coffee farmers typically own the land and often live on it. On the other hand, owners of tea plantations hire tea pickers, who often are migrant laborers who are interested in using digital financial services to remit money home securely and safely.