Pollen

Pollen is designed to be a USSD ecosystem for conducting cross-telecom/boarder remittances, payments and savings for the Unbanked people.

Pollen is a USSD menu that connects farmers to information, agriculture,

and financial services. Pollen empowers people to bank themselves and make payments by providing a simple USSD service to conduct cross telecom/boarder remittances and savings. Our bundled services enable users to access a wide range of products and services offered by various business. Pollen's goal is to enable people conduct shopping online, paying bills online, buying airtime and data and sending money to other users without opening a bank account, all this via a USSD platform. We are one of the first saving and payment services on USSD and the first ever-decentralized application to run on USSD. On the front-end, we are a typical USSD interface with numerical and text based inputs and outputs. Pollen is built on the Celo blockchain: an open, permissionless DLT with Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible smart contracts.

In rural areas, Zambians are more excluded from formal financial services, as as are women. Almost 54 percent of Zambia’s adult population are formally financially excluded. Levels of financial exclusion has gradually increased among smallholder farmers. Remote locations make it expensive to onboard smallholder farmers through necessary KYC. Lack of digital identities, absence of collateral, and difficulty forecasting crop production makes it near impossible to offer loans at reasonable rates. As a result, many farmers fail to invest in yield-increasing upgrades like new irrigation systems, new machinery, new fertilizers, and technology for sensing and tracking crop growth. The most common path to capital is bank loans, with land as collateral. This is an unattractive proposition for farmers, who already bear the many risks of production, including bad weather, changing market prices, or even the shocks of geopolitical events. Lenders, on the other hand, have an incomplete assessment of their risk, especially with potential borrowers who have no credit history. Lenders also lack data and tools to predict their return on investment. Therefore, the Low levels of financial access by small-scale farmer results in failure to optimize crop productivity.

Zambia has 1.9million smallholder farmers who lives below the poverty line that is $1.90 per day, and who are classified as extremely poor. The solution target smallholder farmers in rural farming communities, individuals, youth, farming cooperatives and women saving groups. By including youth and women in this project, we tap into existing social networks of farmers who already know, rely on, and trust each other. By promoting out-grower and community-saving schemes among smallholder and livestock farmers, we enable them to fund equipment and agri-input purchase without the need for a bank to give them a loan. The solution aims to transform the income of people in rural areas, reduce their poverty by enabling them to grow more, sell more, earn more, and have more income streams, offers climate smarting farming services and provide them with an easy access decentralized finance options and saving circles.

Fourth Line has been working with over 800 farmers for the past 4 years

and successfully implemented the Pamodzi Honey project. The project was
commenced in 2016 in 16 rural districts of Zambia with the business model of
distributing beehives to the rural community and then buys the honey product from them. As of August 2019 we had managed to distribute over 2500 beehives.  It was from this project that we observed financial exclusion challenges among farmers and decided to start Pollen. We have worked closely with farmers who have knowledge of village banking in
designing the solution and researching. While conducting user research, we
found that lack of internet access means we can have an immediate impact on farmers' lives, even if they don’t use our financial services. We deeply
believe that helping farmers grow and improve their lives on our platform—prior to using our financial services—will result in greater trust, adoption, and retention.

The solution is 90% developed. We have a fully developed USSD menu which is able to run on blochchain and interact with DeFi protocols, weather APIs and mobile money platforms provided by telecom companies. We conducted few in house testing with selected farmers. The results were impressive in the sense that users are able to conduct self registration, set up an account, choose a services, subscribe to weekly weather updates, see general farming information and deposit funds on the platform. Currently we are make few improvement and adjustment to the system. We believe we are within 6 months to launch our solution. To date, we have successfully on-boarded with several mobile money service providers, including MTN and Zamtel. We are live on MTN and currently doing tests with the Zamtel API. We believe these integrations were good practice to set us up for integrating with Airtel mobile money so we can finally move into the go-to-market and scaling stage of our venture.

Our solution leverages on Celo blockchain technology. Pollen does not rely on traditional databases or servers. Instead, funds are managed on the Celo blockchain: an open, permissionless DLT with Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible smart contracts. In this environment, transactions are settled within five seconds with complete immutability. Further, the Celo blockchain maintains 100% uptime, 365 days a year. In addition to the blockchain is our cloud server that processes USSD, SMS, and web requests. This is also where we call weather and crop price APIs, and send notifications to users. Our cloud server is an Ubuntu virtual private computer (VPC) hosted on Digital Ocean. Additionally, this is where we implement the KotaniPay API for bridging USSD to the Celo blockchain, while also providing on-/off-ramps for MPesa users. Finally, we have a MySQL database for storing non-crucial information, such as user location and user-identifiable information collected upon signup. This database is hosted through 000webhost.

The solution aims to serve 2500 farmers by enabling tangible income and access to market (70% women & 80% youth), enabling farmers to grow and sell more as they will have access to credit, allowing them to reach prosperity. We plan to empower 2,500 smallholder farmers with this grant by targeting farming cooperatives throughout rural Zambia. We will start by running pilots with 3 farming cooperatives with 30 farmers each. Specifically, we will be collecting data on the mobile money on-/off-ramps, joining circles, depositing into circles, requesting money via proposals, voting on proposals, and more. We will also pilot using Pollen to pay our bee-farmers, which would automatically onboard them to the ecosystem and allow them to get paid in a currency that appreciates to their local currency. One critical area we hope to explore is how to keep funds circulating within communities, as opposed to immediately cashing out to mobile money. As such, we will continue to onboard as many agricultural input providers possible (e.g. irrigation, seed, fertilizer, etc) to help negate the need to cashout (beyond the escape from inflation)

The provision of bundled services to small-scale farmers will enhance agricultural production which will reduce poverty and improve livelihood will enable us to achieve sustainable developmental Goal No 1 and 2. The solution is contributing towards alleviating poverty and end hunger in all its forms everywhere. We aim to create 500 out-grower schemes for the period of the project, mainly comprising of youth and women who are going to benefit from skill development, sustainable incomes, expanded potential micro agri-businesses and a guaranteed immediate market for their produce, as we give them free onsite training on how to adopt climate smart farming techniques. By including youth and women in this project, we tap into existing social networks of farmers who already know, rely on, and trust each other. By promoting out-grower and community-saving schemes among smallholder and livestock farmers, we enable them to fund equipment and drought resilient agri-input purchase without the need for a bank to give them a loan. Also by providing the unbanked farmers with a means to generate income (sustainable farming) and a means to save, borrow, and lend (Pollen), we not only help build financial wealth and literacy, but also sustainable communities. In this way, we not only provide an on-ramp to empowerment, but financial services and financial inclusion. This solution aims to provide an ultra-efficient ecosystem for peer-to-peer lending to service the unbanked, promote saving, and a farmer's pathway to prosperity.

We are planning to employ methods of tracking and measuring certain KPIs related to the social, economic and environmental impacts as a result of our solution.  Among the SDGs we would like to contributes towards through our solution are: SDG 1,2 and 8.  We will track the reduction in levels poverty, increase in income and profit, improved  savings on community and individual levels and acquisition of new farming equipment. We are also interested in tracking the reduction in rates of deforestation and charcoal burning in the communities were are serving.

Finance is one of the big barrier we are facing right now. We need a considerable amount of funding for us to accomplish and achieve our goal. Legal is also proving to be a challenge as we require a license from the central bank for our solution to be launched. So far we have managed to sort out technical challenges we had prior to the development of the solution. The markets is not a big challenge as we believe to be within 6 month of take our product and solution to the markets.

We have a dedicated team of founders that are driven by the goal of helping farmers reach prosperity using financial innovations. Chiyanika Nakasamu and David Mwabila, co-founders of Fourth Line Limited, are bee farming experts with a track record of having social impact. They also have extensive experience working with farmers that participate in savings circles. David is a Mandela Washington Fellow and GOAT Keeper for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Previously, David worked as an economic analyst intern at the United Nation Economic Commission for Africa. Chiyanika has 3 years of experience in business consulting, tax management and business strategy advisory. 
The magicians behind our technical innovations is Eric Cuellar our team lead. Eric is an industrial engineering student at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. 

Eric co-founded Blockchain at Cal Poly, a student run research, development, and education platform that has built several decentralized applications, published peer-reviewed papers, and launched successful startup companies. In 2019, Eric co-authored a paper titled, On Stablecoins: Stability Mechanisms and Use Cases for Real People, which was published in the UC Santa Cruz Third International Symposium on Foundations and Applications of Blockchain. In this paper, Eric and his co-authors outlined a novel method for connecting mobile money users in Africa to decentralized financial services using stablecoins and interest bearing liquidity pools. Now he is turning this dream into a reality by spearheading the development of Pollen

We have partnered with organizations like Celo which is providin us access to their blockchain technology platform. We have also partnered with local telecom company that provides with mobile money APIs for easy cash in and cash out on our platform. 

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