Empowering Sub-Saharan farmers: The transformative effect of mobile money in agriculture

Abstract

This study investigates the adoption of digital financial services among farmers in 25 Sub-Saharan African economies using data from the World Bank's Global Findex 2021. Applying a logit model, we find that farmers are more likely to adopt mobile money accounts than non-farmers, particularly in rural areas. However, the adoption rate remains below 30 %, highlighting the limited transformative effect of mobile money on financial inclusion. Moreover, we find that farmers primarily use mobile money for saving, borrowing, receiving remittances, and digital payments. Additionally, disadvantaged groups such as female and less educated individuals are likely to use mobile money for borrowing and remittances, offering pathways to strengthen agricultural livelihoods. Interestingly, our results show that mobile money adoption and usage are higher in countries that introduced the service more recently, suggesting that late adopters leverage mobile money services more intensively. These findings, robust to propensity score matching and inverse-probability-weighted regression adjustment methods, provide actionable insights for policymakers to promote digital financial inclusion and agricultural resilience across the region.