The Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA) has launched a range of digital platforms, including a mobile app, a short messaging service (SMS) and an unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) channel, to boost engagement with smallholder tea farmers in the country.
The agency said the move is part of its reforms agenda aimed at providing transparency and accountability by giving farmers full visibility of the status of their accounts around the clock.
“Through this initiative, tea farmers will now be able to receive daily, weekly and monthly notifications on plucked tea weights and payments as well as conduct queries on fertiliser disbursements and receive regular news from the organisation,” said KTDA in a statement on Thursday.
The KTDA Farmers App, already available for download on the Google Play Store, will provide an interactive interface that has information about various services at a go and will be available only to registered growers.
The organisation says farmers will be required to register with their grower number and phone number on the application, adding that an iOS version is currently under development.
The SMS platform, KTDA says, is a multi-levelled system engineered to enable communications from factories to their farmers and stakeholders regarding weights through a subscription service.
