An Assessment of FISP e-voucher Performance

Abstract

The failure of the agricultural sector to provide livelihoods for people in rural areas is considered a major factor that contributes to rural poverty and food insecurity. The Zambian government started the Farmer Input Support Program (FISP) in 2002in order to stimulate the growth of the agricultural sector and to improve the performance of the smallholders. However, the administration of the FISP manual system has had challenges resulting in high operational cost and/or decimal impact on smallholder performance and graduation.

In order to mitigate the FISP challenges, the FISP Electronic Voucher system was introduced in 2015/2016 farming season. The E-voucher system has been in operation for the past two farming seasons and conflicting reports for its successes and failures have been reported in Zambian's daily papers as well as published research articles. This study had been undertaken in order to assess the performance of the E-voucher system by hearing from smallholders.

A survey research was undertaken using structured and semi structured questionnaires. The stallholders in Kabwe were targeted and the findings revealed that the e-voucher system was largely successful, but required more improvement in input some areas such as on time release of funds to e-voucher holders, improve availability of agro-dealer input stocks and designing a proper e-voucher exit strategy.