In 2015 mPedigree partnered the Uganda National Bureau of Standards (UNBS) to roll out a mobile phone-powered traceability and e-verification service for agricultural inputs and commodities.
The initiative brought together the E-Tags quality certification and auditing service of the UNBS and mPedigreeโs Goldkeys serialisation and authentication engine to create a channel for verifying the source and supply chain status of agro-inputs as well as their conformance with acceptable quality standards under Ugandan law and regulations.
Farmers, regulatory inspectors, researchers, media personnel, and the general public now benefit from the user-friendly, toll-free, mobile hotline that has already been implemented with support from the major telecommunications companies in Uganda, enabling them to instantly retrieve critical quality and authenticity information about individual packs of agro-inputs at the point of purchase.
Running on the fast and powerful USSD protocol, the service assures users of receiving a response on whether a particular agro-input is sound for use or not within seconds 98 per cent of the time. The verification process is designed to happen right at the point of purchase.
The system launched at a time when estimates put the prevalence of fake seeds in Uganda at between 30 per cent and 40 per cent of total local supply.
The e-verification service aims over its lifecycle to empower five million farmers and, at the peak of the rollout, generate more than US$1 billion in aggregate value per year.
