Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA) has unveiled a communication platform that seeks to enable tea farmers receive daily, weekly and monthly notifications of their trading with the firm.
It incorporates the use of a mobile application, Short Messaging Service (SMS) and an Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD).
The firm says the move will also seek to enhance communication, engagement and account management for over 600,000 smallholder tea farmers in the country.
"This is part of our reforms agenda aimed at providing transparency and accountability by giving farmers full visibility of the status of their accounts," the firm says in a statement.
Notifications sent to the farmers will entail details on plucked tea weights, payments, conduct queries on fertiliser disbursements, updates and extension services.
Commenting on the development, KTDA management services managing director, Julius Onguso, said the move is well aligned with the state's efforts to transform the tea sector.
"By embracing and leveraging technology to enhance our communication and engagement with our farmers, we believe that this will enhance the transparency and credibility of all our undertakings for the farmers," Onguso said.
The firm says the KTDA Farmers App currently in google play store will provide an interactive interface that provides information about various services at a go and will be available to registered farmers.
It was first piloted across eight factories. However, an iOS version of the app is still unavailable, the firm saying is currently in development.
On the other hand, the SMS platform is accessible through a subscription by sending a keyword to the KTDA short code (20213).
Farmers can also use the USSD code (*302#), to conduct queries on, among others, green leaf deliveries, payment status and fertiliser disbursement.
