There are nearly 140 million smallholder farms worldwide, with more than two billion people depending on them for their livelihoods. Yet, only 3% of rural farmers’ demand for financial services are met.
This is my story of designing “Sprout” — a mobile app that brings finance to the agricultural last mile.
I had the opportunity to join Kestrel, a two-person startup team consisting of an Operations Lead and Software Developer. The startup was in early stage funding and had only existed for a month prior. When I joined, a rough prototype of the app named CropCard had been developed.
As the sole Product Designer, I led a complete redesign of the app from October to November 2022. My responsibilities included product strategy, UX research, and UI design.
The evolution of the app from pre (left and middle) and post (right) redesign.
Rural communities are culturally different from cities, leading to different opportunities for culturally appropriate design. Research focusing on embeddedness and long-term partnerships has a much better chance of producing solutions that are driven by rural users, instead of being imposed on them.
Much of the informal loaning that occurs between farmers and vendors is still on paper. Sprout would have to officiate ‘buy now pay later’ loans using common technology that already thrive in the rural landscape (i.e. mobile devices).
Farmer and agribusiness incomes are entirely dependent on the production cycle of plantation, growth, and harvest. Our loans must be structured around the seasonal cash flow of farmers, ensuring they can access credit when it is needed and start repayments after harvest.
We knew that a large portion of our clients were farmers across rural India, home to nearly 400 languages. In addition, 30% of marginal and small farms are illiterate. The previous text-dependent design quickly proved infeasible given the need for labor-heavy translations.