846,000 Out of 1,000,000 captured on e-voucher system- Siliya
By Staff Reporter
Eight hundred and forty six thousand farmers out of one Million farmers have been captured so far under the e-voucher system.
Agriculture minister Dora Siliya said at a press briefing in Lusaka that the target was 1,000,000 farmers while six banks and two mobile solutions were contracted to expedite the disbursement of funds.
“I would like to say here that some of the banks have done very well particularly I must mention Indo Zambia Bank and Zanaco and even though other banks are beginning to catch up like Barclays and others, we still have one bank that is giving us quite a challenge and we just finished a meeting with that particular bank to ensure that we expedite the uploading of these cards,” Siliya said.
Siliya said her Ministry had a lot of challenges in adding more farmers to the e-voucher system.
“We did experience a number of challenges as a ministry as a result of rolling the programme from 39 districts to 110 districts and we did expect that we would have some of the challenges. Some of the challenges included; late release of resources from government itself, we only begun releasing funds in late November; we also faced a challenge of late registrations even though the registration of farmers had begun much earlier in July, many people probably didn’t have confidence and when their colleagues began to redeem their cards in December, suddenly some farmers began to come along saying they needed to be on the programme.
