Case Study: World Food Programme improves smallholder farmers’ market access with SocialCops’ Collect

Improving Market Access for Smallholder Farmers in Zambia

The World Food Programme partnered with SocialCops to help address a major challenge facing smallholder farmers in Zambia: limited access to real-time market information, which left many forced to sell crops to middlemen at low prices. To assess its pilot of the Maano virtual farmer’s market app, WFP used SocialCops’ Collect mobile data collection platform to gather monitoring and evaluation data from rural farmers.

Using SocialCops’ Collect, WFP surveyed 50 lead farmers and nearly 1,200 follower farmers across four districts, capturing 1,650 field surveys and 68,000 data points. The pilot helped facilitate 100 pulse transactions worth $47,000 and 50 metric tons of trade, and the data insights are now supporting expansion to 500 lead farmers and 25,000 follower farmers.

World Food Programme

Jayadeep Akkireddy

Innovator and Co-Founder of Virtual Farmers' Market (Maano) App