Around the world, farming has become a high-tech enterprise. But in Uganda, it hasn’t changed much in centuries. While smallholders in Vietnam produce approximately 2,500 kilograms of green coffee per hectare, in Uganda, yields are closer to 500 kilograms. The difference, in large part, is soil nutrition.

NKG BLOOM Uganda focuses on three key offerings: Soil analysis and fertilizer availability; mobile money advances; and professional assistance in agriculture and business best practices. An initial BLOOM effort in Uganda—inspiration for the global initiative—has already provided advances for fertilizer to more than 6,000 farmers.

In addition to fertilizer, the mobile money advances offer farmers immediate, and more regular, access to cash and enable them to avoid predatory lenders. Up to a predefined limit per harvest, farmers can withdraw mobile money as often and for whatever purposes they like; the advance is then repaid during the harvest, preferably with coffee.

Three years in, BLOOM has expanded its agricultural trainings to farmers, added advances for tarpaulins for coffee drying and is launching larger investment advances—longer-term loans for farmers to further invest in their coffee farms. It’s also helping to reactivate and strengthen village coffee organizations and offering farmer groups digitized receipts and working-capital loans that are also repaid with coffee.

Further disproving old stereotypes against lending to farmers, Ibero has seen borrowing increase in September and April, when school fees are due, and repayment rates have exceeded 99 percent.