For Women Farmers in Liberia, Digital Access Is Opening New Markets

Women farmers play a central role in Liberia’s agricultural sector and local food production. Yet for many rural women, limited access to markets, financial services and infrastructure continues to make it difficult to grow businesses and increase income.

For years, Gertrude Kpoleh, an oil palm and cassava farmer from Bong County, sold her products only within nearby communities because reaching larger markets was often out of reach. 

Like many rural women farmers, she faced the combined effects of financial exclusion, limited connectivity and restricted market access.

To help respond to these challenges, UN Women Liberia launched the Buy from Women digital platform under the Digital Inclusion for Women’s Economic Empowerment (D4WEE) project, in partnership with Orange Liberia, the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection and other national stakeholders.

Through the platform, rural women farmers can connect with buyers across Liberia and beyond, receive payments through Orange Money — Liberia’s leading mobile payment service — and access real-time weather forecasting to plan harvests and sales around climate conditions. The platform was designed to work in low-connectivity environments and requires no traditional bank account, removing two of the most common barriers to participation for rural women.

The platform was also built as an open system — one that UN Women Liberia and its government partners fully own and can adapt without depending on any external vendor. That institutional ownership is part of what makes the model replicable beyond Liberia.

The project also works closely with women’s farming cooperatives and Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs), with the platform designed to manage cooperative membership, products and transactions — not just individual sellers. This cooperative-centred design, combined with a partnership with the Central Bank of Liberia, helped connect women to formal financial services for the first time.

Since the project launched in 2022, over 3,000 women have increased their income through improved market access using the platform. Across Bong, Lofa and Nimba Counties, 17 farming cooperatives are now active on the system.

To date, 591 sales transactions have generated USD 349,300 in income for women farmers. An additional USD 46,800 in seed funding has been provided to cooperatives to start and scale business activities. The initiative has also supported 400 rural women in opening formal bank accounts for the first time.

The Liberia experience — recognised as a best practice by UN Women and published in January 2025 — demonstrates how purposeful technology design built on open-source architecture, mobile-first payments and cooperative management can expand economic opportunity at scale. The model is now being explored for wider adaptation across West and Central Africa.

For women like Gertrude, digital access is not only changing how products are sold. It is helping open new pathways to economic participation and financial independence.

This article was contributed by Itban Omair, Manager of ERP Applications at UN Women Headquarters, who designed the technical architecture of the Buy from Women platform in Liberia.