The developer of blockchain-based technology from Singapore has joined hand with Indonesian agritech startup HARA to bring financial inclusion in farming

Singaporean blockchain-based tech provider Pundi X has announced partnership with HARA, the fellow Indonesian company that focuses on changing the agriculture using data. Both companies will release blockchain-based point of sales (POS) devices to farmers to help with data collection and to reach financial inclusion.

The partnership with Pundi X will enable transactions in digital currencies for mainly farmers to collect and exchange these incentives.

Also Read: Indonesia to launch startup database as reference for digital industry development

It will also seek to promote financial inclusion among farmers who can use the blockchain-based POS independently of financial institutions. This is an answer to the statistics that show more than 50 per cent of consumers in Indonesia’s economy who are still ‘unbanked’ even with the existence of more than 200 banks nationally.

In its initial deploy, one XPOS device will be made available for 200 farmers in the selected areas.

With its technology, HARA collects data from across the agricultural and food value chain in developing markets to boost productivity, profits, and livelihoods for farmers and employees, all in real time. This helps farmers, NGOs, and other on-the-ground partners to provide data on ecological, crop, and market conditions for an incentive exchange in a form of HARA Tokens, that these people can monetise.

HARA claimed to have collected agricultural data from roughly 10,000 farmers across Indonesia. The data collection itself was made possible with the support of Indonesian regional governments and directly-elected local government leaders known as regents or ‘Bupati’ in Indonesian.

Aside from being exchangeable, the data can support agricultural resources to be used more efficiently and to avoid wastage. These will directly benefit farmers’ livelihoods because of the agricultural productivity that contributes in lowering the number of people living in poverty.

HARA plans on entering other seven ppriority agriculture markets across South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and East Africa, targeting up to twomillion users.

“We are proud that the Pundi X POS will soon be rolled out among HARA’s network of farming partners and can help facilitate their plans to better such a significant sector of the world economy and the lives of the hundreds of millions of people who depend upon it,” said Constantin Papadimitriou, the President and co-founder of Pundi X.

The collected data is needed by consumers who are interested in food origins, transportation sector, insurers in need of data about market and farming conditions, and governments and interests across the smart agriculture market, predicted to reach US$12 billion by 2021.

“The addition of the Pundi X POS to our ecosystem allows us to provide the important missing piece of digital payments processing for the large unbanked populations we’re aiming to serve,” said Regi Wahyu, the CEO and co-founder of HARA.

Also Read: Singapore’s Fundnel launches private investment marketplace in Malaysia

With HARA’s approach, financial inclusion is possible because there’s a guarantee of a valid farmers’ data, thus making the process for the banks easier. This helps farmers to overcome administrative and legal issues such as the absence of land certificate and tax registration number.

HARA is reportedly in the process of conducting an Initial Token Sale to raise capital. The token sale is conducted through the Liquid ICO Market and Tokenomy Launchpad platforms.

The pre-sale period will last until November 13th at 8:59 AM (GMT+7), followed by a public sale period which will last from November 13th, 2018 (GMT+7 9:00 AM) until November 30th, 2018 (GMT+7 9:00 AM).
–

Image Credit: Pundi X

The post Singaporean Pundi X works with HARA to bring blockchain to farming appeared first on e27.