Closing out 2019 on a remarkable note
What a year it was for HARA in 2019! Within a year, we have successfully doubled our ecosystem to 31,233 smallholder farmers in 741 villages — which was made possible through the hard work of our 850 agripreneurs and 234 HARA Depo kiosks. From opening up access to different financing options, establishing HARA Depo partnerships, offering crop insurance, to getting international recognition, 2019 was surely a memorable year. Let’s take a step back and reflect on what happened! :-)
With a mission to promote financial inclusion, we are proud to share our loan disbursement has increased by 585% from 2018. We focused on both scale and operational excellence, which sped the processes of loan origination and disbursement to farmers. By the end of 2019, these previously deemed “unbankable” smallholder farmers were able to get financing totaling IDR 13.5 B with a repayment rate of 97%. Many were also repeat orders in the following seasons to continue investing in their farms. We hope with access to formal financing, farmers will be able to invest in working capital and maximize their productive capacities.
At the beginning of August, we launched the first batch of the HARA Depos, where local kiosk owners work together with us to form an inclusive and equitable marketplace. The program supports both smallholder farmers and kiosk owners: farmers will be able to purchase agricultural goods while kiosk owners will be able to access a larger customer base. In addition, kiosk owners will receive a series of capacity building training on good agriculture practice, store management, and entrepreneurship. In October 2019, BNI joined HARA and launched “Mencetak 1000 Agripreneur Desa” to groom 1,000 Hara Depo kiosks within the next year. To date, there are 234 Depo kiosks in our growing community.
For smallholder farmers whose livelihood is constructed around a single plot of land, losing crops from unpredictable instances means losing their entire means of subsistence. To protect these farmers from such occurrences, HARA partnered with Qoala, an insuretech startup, to introduce a crop protection program since November 2019. This multi-peril crop insurance program covers farmers from crop failures due to pests and diseases, extreme weather, and natural disasters such as floods and drought. Through technology and data analytics, we are able to improve the claim process for farmers to be time-efficient and effective.
We are grateful that our efforts and achievements have received recognition from around the globe. In March 2019, HARA was invited to showcase our work at SXSW (South by Southwest) Conference, in the United States. Represented by Regi Wahyu (CEO), HARA impressed the crowd during the ignite session of “designing the world”. A few months later, we received the Agriculture Insuretech Innovation Challenge Award hosted by the World Bank Group, in Mumbai, India. At the Blockchain for Social Impact Conference in Seoul, South Korea, Regi was there to introduce HARA as the first Indonesian blockchain company working towards data in the agriculture landscape. We also got the chance to visit the annual Bloomberg Data for Good Exchange Conference in New York, USA, where Larissa Sidarto, Director of Business Development and Marketing, and Magisha Thohir, business analyst, shared HARA’s experience in using data to promote financial inclusion for smallholder farmers.
In November 2019, we were honored to receive the best social enterprise in the technology sector at the CECT Sustainability Award. That same month we also launched two programs; INFRATANI and HARANOVA. Working with the Central Bank of Indonesia, the INFRATANI program aims to build a Halal Value Chain by digitizing integrated agricultural data, where players from farmers, processors, to buyers can trace the information throughout the chain, making the ecosystem transparent. Lastly, together with Inovator 4.0, we started HARANOVA, an initiative to manage decentralized agricultural data based on blockchain technology. It will be an alternative solution for overlapped data by inviting all interested parties in making a data-driven decision.
As you can see, 2019 was a great year for us! We are very grateful for all the opportunities, and we look forward to an even better 2020. Empowering farmers, one byte at a time.
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