A Mastercard for Pigs? How Digital Infrastructure is Transforming Farming and Fighting Poverty

Tara Nathan is the EVP of Digital Solutions for Development at Mastercard and the founder of Mastercard’s Community Pass– a digital infrastructure that connects remote agricultural communities to governments, NGOs and the private sector. Community Pass currently serves 6 million farmers across India and East Africa and has an ambitious plan to reach 30 million by 2027.

In this episode, Tara tells host Ellen McGirt about creating an ecosystem that makes it possible for smallholder farmers to participate in the digital economy- a so called “Mastercard for pigs”. She also shares her belief in leveraging both the private and public sectors to solve complex social problems and what she thinks people get wrong about development work.

“There’s an obsession with finding the silver bullet or the app that’s going to cure poverty. I mean, if there was an app that could cure poverty, it would have been done. I say that to my teams all the time,” Nathan says. “ And I think especially when you’re talking about digital ecosystems, there is no silver bullet. There’s no one app that’s going to solve it. So what we are actually trying to do here in Community Pass is connect together all the different actors that are required to make digital transactions happen so that that smallholder farmer can get access to the things that you and I enjoy every single day…For my smallholder farmer, who I sort of live, eat and breathe for, one of the most basic things that we have given them is the ability to purchase an authentic seed…Because their whole business is predicated on having a quality authentic seed that they put in the ground.”

On this season of DB|BD, we are Designing for the Unknown. Host Ellen McGirt asks visionary designers how they navigate uncertainty- whether it be technological disruption, global crises, or shifting cultural norms.

Learn more about Community Pass and the MADE Alliance.

Cocoa na Chocolate’s joyful music video and more on how the song came to be.

If you liked this episode, be sure to revisit DB|BD S11E6: Why an Inclusive Economy is a Redesign Project with Mastercard’s Shamina Singh

Follow The Design of Business | The Business of Design on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. 

Transcript

Ellen McGirt In 2015, I was lucky enough to accompany a group of journalists, writers, and development experts on an extraordinary field trip across Malawi. These were amazing, eye-opening, frustrating, sobering, and joyful experiences, and I feel very privileged to have been able to do this type of reporting. Now, there are lots of places we can go with this, but for the purposes of this conversation, I wanted to tell you about an extraordinary smallholder farmer we met named Mr. Matika. Mr. Matika was the head of a handful of families living and farming together in a tiny community of humble homes. To set the scene, they had no electricity, no running water, used wood fire cook stoves and solar lamps. But Mr. Matika did have a feature phone. It operated as a lifeline for him, connecting him to markets, weather information, other people and technical support. But he said one thing that hit me like a ton of bricks. Mr. Matika could tell us to the day, when the community’s food supply was gonna run out. Why? Climate change had shortened their growing season by more than a month, even back then. And I think about Mr. Matika and those families a lot. I think about how hardworking and vulnerable they were, sophisticated and kind and focused. And I worry, and I wonder what happened to them. And now I think about the ecosystem that has emerged over the years to support people like them, increasingly digital and increasingly sophisticated. And yes, I’m including folks associated with USAID. And now I’m extra worried. And that’s why I’m so glad I have Tara Nathan here to talk through all of this. She’s the EVP of Digital Solutions for Development for MasterCard. And even more to the point, she’s the founder of MasterCard’s CommunityPass, a digital infrastructure that gives people an underserved rural and offline areas access to critical services. CommunityPass started in 2020 and currently has 6 million farmers on its platform. She is absolutely one of the experts I would have had on my short list when I was reporting on poverty and looking to people who were redesigning economic systems to include everyone. I’m Ellen McGirt. This is The Design of Business|The Business of Design, and this season, we’re designing for the unknown. Tara, thank you. Thank you for being here. 

Tara Nathan Thank you. Thank you for having me. 

Ellen McGirt Let’s dig in and talk a little bit. Tell us a little bit about what you actually do and the programs that you oversee and then I want to get into Community Pass in some detail . 

Tara Nathan I have a very interesting position at Mastercard where we are trying to build out what we call commercially sustainable enterprises, social impact enterprises. And I think what that is all about is saying, you know, we all want to have, make a difference in the world. We want to have positive impact. That’s a human, I think, that’s a human motivator at our very fundamental core. But I think doing so in the practicality that says how do you do so in a manner that can support or that can thrive within a corporation? How can you do so in a manner that can be commercially sustainable so that it is scalable and can really impact not just thousands of people, but millions and potentially billions of people is the kind of work that I do at MasterCard. So creating social impact enterprises that have a dual mandate of not just impact, but of commerciality and commercial sustainability. 

Ellen McGirt So, how does Community Pass play into that? 

Tara Nathan So if you think about what Mastercard, the core business, does, we’re the Mastercard for poor and rural communities. What does Mastercard do? Mastercard is equal parts a technology company, but we’re an ecosystem organizer that brings together all the different actors to make digital payments technology or digital payments to happen globally in a safe, secure, scalable, inexpensive manner. So how do you make payments scalable in a way that they’re cheap, that they’re reliable, that they’re safe and they’re secure. Unfortunately, those capabilities don’t exist, right, for the populations like the farmer that you talked about out in rural communities or in a lot of emerging economies. None of that infrastructure exists, whether you’re talking about internet connectivity, but frankly, right down to identities. I mean, I think we’re used to hearing, you talked about your farmer having a feature phone, right? He’s a lucky farmer because in a lot of communities they don’t have a feature phone and even if they have the phone The connectivity, the uptime that we would talk about, is limited Even if they have the uptime, the cost of having that data connectivity and that access is prohibitive Even if they have that connectivity, they don’t have an identity. I mean that’s something I don’t think in a developed world context. We even think about what that means to not have an identity. It means not to have a social security card, not a driver’s license, not a passport, not an employer ID. So literally, how does someone, a service provider, and a service provider can be anyone from a government to a school, to an employer, to someone who wants to sell you something, to a bank who wants to give you loans or an account. They don’t know who you are, they can’t find you. Without connectivity and without an identity, they can’t find you. And that’s the problem that Community Pass seeks to solve. 

Ellen McGirt So what you described is something that is so complex, and we live in a world where complexity is something we seek to avoid. How do you, who are working both in the corporate and development sphere, straddling these two worlds, help people understand how complex these systems are and how complex the solutions need to be? 

Tara Nathan and I love the point you’re making here. I think we, as a development community, have a tendency to be very reductionist. There’s a tendency, okay? There’s an obsession with finding the silver bullet or the app that’s gonna cure poverty. I mean, if there was an app that could cure poverty, it would have been done. I say that to my teams all the time. The reason we’re working, you know, the problems we’re solving are the most difficult to solve. And I think especially when you’re talking about digital ecosystems, there is no silver bullet. There’s no one app that’s gonna solve it. So what are we actually trying to do here in Community Pass is connect together all the different actors that are required to make digital transactions happen so that that smallholder farmer can get access to the things that I talked about that you and I enjoy every single day, whether it’s banking. the ability to sell something, the ability to buy something, the ability to go to school, it’s not as simple as just having an app, because that farmer has to have a form of identity, a form of identifying who they are. They have to have connectivity. For my smallholder farmer, who I service and who I sort of live, eat and breathe for, one of the most basic things that we have given them is the ability to purchase an authentic seed. Let’s start at that level, right? Because their whole business is predicated on having a quality authentic seed that they put in the ground. And the problems that we see across the developing world is that often the seeds that they’re getting are fake. So imagine you’re someone who you’re upside, your sunny day scenario is I’m gonna earn $2 today. But that farmer was sold a bag of rocks six months ago and wasn’t sold authentic seeds. Six months later, when they plant it in the ground, let’s make it even a more dire situation, they took $100 loan from a loan shark nearby because the bank didn’t reach their community. What we’re doing now through Community Pass is making sure that that farmer is connected to a legitimate seed supplier. So when she plants her seed in the ground, she knows it’s authentic. So already day one, six months later, when the crop comes up, she’s seeing 20 to 50% increase in her offtake and in her yield. Her business has grown by 20 to 50% just because she got what she paid for. Should that be a huge innovation? But she got what she paid for and she’s getting 20 to 50% greater yield. Let’s take the story a little bit further. She had to take a loan, but because she was connected to the community pass platform, she could now be connected to a grade A bank. Let’s say in Kenya, it’s Equity Bank or CRDB Bank in Tanzania, or one of our many other partners. So she can get access to a regular market rate interest loan as opposed to the loanshark loan. So right off the bat, her business has saved somewhere in the range of 10 to 15%. That money goes into her pocket. Let’s take it a step further. Now, because we’ve given her a Community Pass identity, so she has the ability to now track the fact that she made those purchases, that she planted those seeds, and she now has this produce, this off-take, she now has a digital record. She has a credit rating, just like you or I would have with any of the major ones. She now has a credit record. So now she’s able to, next time, get credit at an even better rate for her off-take, or get pesticides, or get fertilizers, or get value-added produce. Now let’s connect it to the last thing. She now can access buyers, and those buyers are now digitally connected to her because she’s able to go into her local farmer producer organization, or she’s able to go to her local agent who comes to her farm gate, and she’s able to say, this is the produce that I have. So she has saved money on her loan. She’s had greater productivity because she’s planted authentic seeds. And now she’s commanded a higher price because she’s actually able to aggregate her off-take and provide it to a buyer who’s willing to compete for her produce. So that’s the kind of value, and those are the types of use cases that we’re pushing to develop and deploy across the CommunityPass platform. 

Ellen McGirt How did you come to this work? I mentioned my quest to understand how the world worked, particularly through this lens of the emerging economies. How did your quest begin? 

Tara Nathan You know, very similar to the story that you opened with, quite curiously. I think I’ve always had a passion for, you know, as I said at the beginning, I’ve always had a passion for doing work that impacted the lives of people in a positive way. I think I always had a mission and a mandate to do good. I saw the private sector as a means to do that at scale. You know, I have a background both that spans sort of I’d say development work, you know, the civil society as well as government. But I really saw a private sector as a effective way to have that impact at a larger scale. And with MasterCard, I was on a trip in a developing country in Southeast Asia. And I was in a very remote village and I came across a a woman who was a farmer, a smallholder farmer, and she had a pig that she wanted to sell. And I said to her, how do you sell your pig? Because it took me almost an hour and a half on dirt roads to get to her house, to get to her farm. So I said, how do you get to a market? How do you know how to sell this pig? How do you get a price for it? And she said something so simple that shocked me. She said, well, the guy tells me the price. What!

Ellen McGirt Oh my goodness. 

Tara Nathan So you’re telling me you’re a small business owner and you’re telling me that all the bargaining power, all the pricing power exists with somebody who comes to your farm gate and you don’t have a means of checking what the market price is, whether you’re getting a fair rate, and you have no means of competing that price out. And it struck me that what we needed, I used to say, we need a MasterCard for pigs. That was my joke for a long time. 

Ellen McGirt That’s a good one. That is a really good one. 

Tara Nathan So I think that’s what we built. We built MasterCard for pigs. 

Ellen McGirt Oh my gosh. So what do people get wrong? This is sort of the philosopher queen part of this conversation. What do people get wrong about development work? I mean, you really, you are literally in the weeds with the pigs. Like, this is extraordinary. What do people get wrong about what development work 

Tara Nathan is. It’s a topic that’s close and near and dear to my heart. I’d say several several things. One, I’ll start where you started, and that is a reductionist mentality that there is a solution that can solve everything. Most things require ecosystems. Doesn’t matter if you’re talking about providing. And so I think it’s thinking along platform lines and ecosystem lines and not trying to find point solutions for things. If you’re trying to deliver healthcare in a sustainable way, you have to, it’s not about flying in 10,000 nets. It’s about doctors and hospitals and cold storage and doctors and digital infrastructure. And I would say it’s the same thing. So you have to have a systems approach to creating sustainable outcomes. That would sort of lead to me to my second point, which is I think there is this notion that the development community can do it alone, that there is this standalone community, which is we are people who do good, and so therefore we are the only ones with the right to do good, and we can solve these problems. And I think these are intractable, systemic issues. that must engage the power and the scalability of the private sector to unlock. I think development sector is always willing to leverage the coffers of the private sector, but leveraging the skill sets, right? There’s no reason for the development sector to be building out banking institutions or technology stacks or identity solutions when that’s what the private sector does all day long. You know, one of the things I always love to hear is in the development space, there’s a lot of talk about, you know, that success for a development organization is when they work themselves out of a job. You probably have heard that. 

Ellen McGirt Yes, I love it. 

Tara Nathan Because to me, if you were, you’d be saying, who am I crowding in for when I’ve worked myself out of a job? And to me, that would be local and global private sector actors whose job it is to provide that service on an ongoing basis. And then I think maybe lastly, it would be to say, you know, I feel like we’ve come a long way, but we’re still not 100% there. The development sector has a real fear of profitability. And they view it as a four-letter word. They think that if the private sector is in there and is doing something commercially that it’s bad. And I would challenge that because I think again, it’s not scalable. If it’s not commercially sustainable in my mind, I think it’s not scalable and it’s not sustainable. 

Ellen McGirt To be fair, oftentimes when for-profit enterprises enter the chat, it has not always gone well. It’s been extractive, it’s been exploitive. There’s a long history of that. And we’re thinking about, I mean, it just seems like we’re having a global conversation about capitalism right now, which is so interesting, is that what is the next version of the type of economy that actually includes everybody? And this is tough. it gets political. It gets economic, gets historic, gets colonial, all of those kinds of things. It’s hard to find a way through when that’s all we’re talking about, we’re reacting to all these talking points. But it does seem to be at some point, at least in my experience, the humbling act of showing up repeatedly in a complex situation, taking the time to understand it and not to look just for the heroes and the villains or the easy solution. but to really join the ecosystem already in progress and make small incremental improvements, which is really hard. It’s hard to measure progress. It’s hard to know that if you’re making a difference. I mean, to me, that’s one of the fundamental things I’ve come to admire about people who really dedicate themselves to this type of work. 

Tara Nathan You’re spot on. We can’t paint the world into heroes and villains. I think we have to see who’s showing up day after day, year after year with the right intentions and doing the right work. And we have to hold each other accountable. We shouldn’t have these false labels and divide into good and evil by private-public. Private doesn’t make you an evil, it doesn’t make you a villain, it doesn’t make you a hero, and the converse is not true, right? So I think you’re spot on. I think we have to sort of try and say, How can we create win-wins? I mean, this is a big passion of ours and of mine. How can you create a win-win for all the actors that play and have an ecosystem of blended objectives? So some actors might be there with a nonprofit objective. Governments might come in and say, my objective is to help my people. Companies may come in and say, I have a profitability, either a short-term profit, if I’m a local smallholder farmer, if I’m a local enterprise. They’re private sector, right? Make no mistake about it, right? Smallholder farmers are private sector. These small little ag techs that are two and three guys in a garage, they’re private sector. They’ve got to make money today so they can feed their family. Maybe there’s a global private sector that can take a longer term commercial view where you say, hey, invest today, invest in the community today and generate or cultivate that market of tomorrow. And that becomes a long-term play for you. And then you have other actors that are really about Implementation and social impact and they’re just on the ground doing that and they have a non-profit objective And those are all great objectives. But I think what we look a lot to do is figure out how do you combine the objectives of each of those actors in an integrated holistic manner? So that we’re acting in concert for the same outcome. And that actually is you know, we founded last year something called the MADE alliance Mobilizing Access to the Digital Economy. 

Ellen McGirt I wanted to ask you about that. 

Tara Nathan And that’s exactly what it’s trying to do, Ellen. The MADE Alliance, Mobilizing Access to the Digital Economy in Africa is saying, how do we take the best and the brightest of what they do, crowd them in with their respective objectives? So we’ve got donors like the African Development Bank who are co-chairing this with Mastercard and their objective is to create development impact through primarily debt instruments, right? They do sovereign debt, they do first loss guarantees, et cetera, et cetera. We’ve got other partners like Heifer International, who come in with grants and they come in with programmatic work. We’ve got purely commercial entities like Equity Bank, like CRDB Bank, whose goal it is to provide banking services to the masses, right? But they see the fact that hey, if I’m providing banking services to my population, 60% of my potential customer set are smallholder farmers, are poor farmers. I’ve got to have solutions that address their needs. So they’re purely commercial. So we have this array of partners. We have international organizations or international private sector like Microsoft joining. How do we bring all those different capabilities together to make sure that at the end of the day, we can all sit down and have a meal together? And that’s what the MADE Alliance tries to do. 

Ellen McGirt make sure the voice of the farmer is part of these conversations? You know, they don’t have a union, you know, they’re not part of a big organization, and their individual circumstances vary so greatly. There’s some things that are universally in common and that you’re clearly addressing and there are things that are specific to them. How do you make sure they’re included in this? 

Tara Nathan The farmer is the end consumer of everything we do. So we’re only successful when the farmer uses the product. That’s how we ensure their voice is heard. It starts with the farmer getting a digital identity, leveraging the system, using it to upload their off-take and seeing the benefits of those transactions in terms of higher yields, higher prices, access to credit. because the fact of the matter is if they weren’t getting benefit from it, they wouldn’t use it. That’s point one. I would say the other way is we actually do have, there are farmer federations and there are collective groups and we work together with them. So for example, the Kenyan Farmers Federation is a member of the MADE Alliance for exactly the reason that you said. Because as we’re creating this ecosystem, we wanna make sure and it was such a powerful moment. We had the president of the Kenyan, so a lead farmer. This was at UNGA last year. The president of the Kenyan Farmers Federation sitting next to James Mwangi, who is the chairman group chair of Equity Bank, one of the largest banks across Africa, and they’re sitting at a table co-chairing a meeting. A very powerful sort of visual, but a reality, because, and one of the things that we decided as a result of that first MADE coalition meeting was exactly that. We wanted to have more farmer federation voices, actually. So that’s our aim, actually, is to crowd in more and more of them. We already, we partner with Ugandan Farmers Federation, East Africa Farmers Federation. So they’re a big part, not only at the partnership level. But remember I said, ultimately, all the benefit, this ecosystem doesn’t work and doesn’t, isn’t successful until the farmer’s using it. And so, that’s how we measure the progress of our business on a day-to-day basis. How many farmers are using and deriving value. 

Ellen McGirt Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I know the knock-on effect of healthier business, healthier people is that they’re more engaged in civil society. And I think that’s probably something that you keep an eye on, even if it’s not an official KPI. I want to have you take a crack at a really big philosophical question, which I know in advance does not have an answer. So feel no pressure. 

Tara Nathan Good, good. So I’m comfortable being wrong. 

Ellen McGirt There are no wrong answers here. But I am curious, and this is something that we talk a lot about even in the Design Observer newsroom because we’re trying to get better at being systems thinkers and identifying people who, you know, hold a piece of the puzzle that help us understand things, is that billions of dollars over the years, last 30 years in particular, have poured into the development sector in some way, shape, or form, partnerships made and abandoned, you know, simple solutions made and abandoned, earnest efforts launched as well. And yet, poverty still persists. Why does poverty still persist? What is the nature of it? Has it changed over time? And I mentioned the USAID piece that’s in the news. We’re all thinking about it. And all of a sudden, lots and lots of regular people are weighing in on the very idea of development. And I’m struck by how little we actually know about how the world works. 

Tara Nathan  There’ve been a lot of studies that demonstrate that the biggest thing to drive economic or poverty alleviation is economic growth. So to me, it’s economic growth is the answer. When I look at the majority of the world that’s currently in poverty, I say the sector that they operate in is agriculture. So there’s been a lot of studies that show that interventions in agriculture have the greatest impact on poverty alleviation. So numerically, I think that’s true. So if you believe the axiom that economic growth creates poverty alleviation, and I think we saw that over the past 50 years, which is why we’re focused on agriculture. 60% across Africa of the people are smallholder farmers. They’re in agriculture or touch it. Across the African continent, depending on the country, between 30 to 40% of GDP comes from agriculture. So finding ways to improve productivity, and to create commercially sustainable ecosystems that are scalable for them, to me, will have the greatest impact on poverty. Is that the silver bullet for poverty I can’t answer, right? Because to me, the question you’re asking is so profound. It depends, I think, on the context. If you’re talking within a given country, there’s all kinds of other factors, right? Education and systems and what not. But if I think globally from a top-down perspective, to me, it’s economic growth with the largest amount of poverty happening in countries where ag is the big driver of that poverty alleviation. 

Ellen McGirt That was the master class. Tara, out of the park. 

Tara Nathan I don’t know about that. 

Ellen McGirt Tara, what do you do for fun? 

Tara Nathan Oh, gosh. I can answer that in so many ways. Yeah, you know, I’ll give you the honest answer. I’ll give you my instinctive answer, and then I’ll tell you a more subtle sort of nuanced answer. The honest answer is… I’m an entrepreneur, and so when you’re an entrepreneur, like I’m an intrepreneur, right? And when you’re an intrepreneur, this is your passion, this is what I do for fun. Community Pass is my dream, my passion, my love, it’s everything. You can’t, and I was a little bit maybe nuanced about it when I said you have to be tenacious. You have to eat, breathe, live and die this. I wake up at 4 a.m. and I start working. That’s what I do. 

Ellen McGirt I believe it. 

Tara Nathan And because, and when I read and I’m excited about reading in the evenings, I read about smallholder farmers. I read about, I read, you know, a hundred page World Bank. That’s my passion. But the other for TV version is that I like walking my dog on the beach. But I do like walking my dog on the beach. I have a Doberman and I love, I love exercising and working out and running with my Doberman on the beach. That’s what I love doing. 

Ellen McGirt Oh my goodness. What’s your dog’s name? 

Tara Nathan Her name is Samatha. Samatha. or Sammy for short. Samatha is a Sanskrit, a Pali word actually, I believe, but it means it’s a mind of meditative equipo. So it’s a calm meditative mind. And if you’ve ever met my dog, you’ll know she’s the antithesis of that. So I think she was really, really misnamed, but I always say that it’s aspirational. 

Ellen McGirt Oh yes, I love it. We’re going to need to meet that dog one day and I look forward to running to you on the beach. Tara, every moment with you is a pleasure and I feel better knowing that the small holder farmers of the world and also the economic health and future of lots and lots of vulnerable people are safe because you’re up at 4 a.m. thinking about them. 

Tara Nathan You really talk me off the ledge today. Oh, thank you, thank you. I love talking to you both. It’s been so amazing. And yeah, your show is a great inspiration for sort of not only just your audience, and especially in this time. So thank you. 

Ellen McGirt Thank you. You take care. 

Ellen McGirt This season, we are ending every episode with a new segment we’re calling The Business of Design. It will feature either a short interview with or a story about a designer or creative who exemplifies design’s power to shape the world for good. This week after talking to Tara, I found myself humming Cocoa na Chocolate and no, I’m not gonna sing it for you. 

Various artists Cocoa na Chocolate plays

Ellen McGirt If you’ve never heard of it, Cocoa na Chocolate is both a political campaign and a really catchy tune. In 2014, 19 African musicians, including Femi Kuti, Jiuliani, and Judith Safuma, got together with ONE foundation to record a song explaining the power agriculture has to alleviate poverty on the continent and calling on governments to increase their investments in the agricultural value chain. The resulting song is a powerful call to action for youth to join the sector. It’s joyful, and has an iconic music video. Think We Are the World, but by African artists singing in 11 different languages, and without all the behind the scenes drama. On one of my reporting trips, I actually met most of these artists who had convened with Bono and the one team in Lagos to get an update on the campaign. They were as committed as they are talented. They didn’t know Mr. Matika, but they knew his plight. Enjoy this clip of Cocoa no Chocolate. The link to the music video when other information is in our show notes. I guarantee you, it will sweeten your day. 

Various artists Cocoa na Chocolate plays

Ellen McGirt The Design of Business| The Business of Design is a podcast from Design Observer. Design Observer was co-founded by Jessica Helfand. Our show is written and produced by Alexis Haut. Our theme music is by Warner Meadows. Justin D. Wright of Seaplane Armada mixed and mastered this episode. Thanks as always to Sheena Medina, Sarah Gephardt, Rachel Paese, Richard Fields, and the entire Design Observer team. And for more long-form content about the people redesigning our world, please consider subscribing to our newsletters, the Design of Business and the Observatory at designobserver.com.