Abstract—In the process of cultivation, from the point of deciding to plant a certain crop to the point of selling harvest to the market, farmers incur many expenses at different stages of the crop life cycle. 75% of smallholder farmers around the world includes the world’s poorest. Most of them face constraints in getting finance to cover such costs. Microfinance, a method of offering small loans to the marginal, has evolved as a major institutional source to provide financial facilities to such people. Although there is ample evidence showing that microfinance has a positive impact on economic activities, securing the livelihood of the marginal people by uplifting their economic status, it can be a dilemma at the same time, since the severe indebtedness caused by microfinance loans has led impoverished communities to economic, social, and environmental vulnerabilities. In this paper, we present a blockchain-based conceptual model for sustainable microfinance outreach for farmers where the microfinance institutes can dynamically adjust the loans they provide according to the farmer’s actions resulting in a reduction in severe indebtedness and vulnerabilities while smoothing the crop cultivation process leading to better farm outputs and income.
Index Terms—Blockchain, cryptocurrency, farmers, microfinance, smart contracts.
The authors are with the Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia (e-mail: m.kumarathunga@westernsydney.edu.au, r.calheiros@westernsydney.edu.au, a.ginige@westernsydney.edu.au).
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Cite:Malni Kumarathunga, Rodrigo N. Calheiros, and Athula Ginige, "Sustainable Microfinance Outreach for Farmers with Blockchain Cryptocurrency and Smart Contracts," International Journal of Computer Theory and Engineering vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 9-14, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).
