Improving Agricultural Livelihoods Through E-vouchers in Zambia: Leveraging Technology to Streamline and Strengthen Farm Subsidies
This report examines Zambia’s agricultural subsidy programs, particularly the electronic voucher (e-voucher) system, aimed at enhancing food security and rural income. In addition, it enumerates the challenges faced, and puts forth policy recommendations for improvement.
This report delves into the Zambian government’s agricultural subsidy programs, which are designed to bolster crop yield and overall production by granting small scale farmers better access to essential modern inputs such as fertilisers and high-quality seeds. The government introduced them in the early 2000s in an effort to improve food security, raise the incomes of rural farmers and reduce poverty, and is currently testing the electronic voucher (e-voucher) system as a way of improving the management and execution of these subsidies. The e-voucher system, piloted in 13 districts, will replace the existing Farmer Input Support Program (FISP), and has shown promise in overcoming issues like late input delivery and ghost beneficiaries.
Although the system has been successful in engaging private sector companies and reducing leakages, it is not without its challenges. Delays in e-card issuance, a bias toward maize production, favouring wealthier families due to upfront contributions, price volatility, and limited farmer awareness have proven to be hurdles that need to be overcome.
This report puts forth four key policy recommendations to overcome these challenges and ensure the effective scaling-up of the e-voucher system. These recommendations revolve around promoting crop diversification, implementing community leader verification to curb leakages, encouraging domestic input production to stabilise prices, and providing training to enhance farmer adoption of the e-voucher system. In doing so, the report seeks to optimise the impact of agricultural subsidies in Zambia’s quest for improved food security and rural economic development.
This report was featured as a chapter in “Transformations in Technology, Transformations in Work”- a joint report co-authored by the global partners of JustJobs Network.
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