Throughout Colombian history farmers have faced a reality completely different to that of the rest of the country. Laws don’t always take their needs into account; society excludes them and they even lived through a 50 year armed conflict that accentuated their vulnerabilities.

On the other hand the digital and technological revolution hasn't reached that target yet, forcing them to rely on intermediaries and brands that don’t give them the benefits they deserve (Farmers only get between 20% and 30% of their produce’s final earnings).

Thinking about this, just like the rest of the financial industry, We have tried in many ways to create banking and financial opportunities for them. Sometimes by creating new and easily accessible products and others by financially educating them for long term economic development. The issue was that these actions didn't take into account their non-financial needs, and these were the most relevant ones.

To better their incomes, many farmer producers go to the roads to try and sell their products directly to consummers, but the Colombians who travel every weekend from big cities to towns pass through the same roads, without seeing them.

That is why Heart Markets was created. A platform that makes farmers visible to the eyes of all travelers passing by.

For the first 5 routes, we identified more than 600 farmer families and marked their stands on Waze. This made them visible to the travelers that use the platform while on the road. They didn't even need to search, the stands showed up on Waze while they were going to their destinations.

At the same time, in order to help guarantee sales, we gave the farmers easy online baking tools and financially trained each of them.

To find relevant farmers needs we interviewed them and found that the subject that they constantly talked about was: getting more money for their produce.

The problem: They did not have direct access to consumers and depended on intermediaries to sell. This meant that while they sell their products for $800 COP intermediaries, in turn, sell them to large supermarkets for twice the price and those set the final price at around $4000 COP. Leaving farmers with a fraction of the earnings.

With this in mind the task became: understanding the context in order to find a solution. Through Waze’s data we found the answer, over 8 million travelers leave big cities for small towns every weekend. This meant that they were traveling by the farmers without actually seeing them.

This finding set a clear audience for communications (travelers) and a solution for farmer's problems (activating travelers passing by).

The roll out took place in two phases: Outreach/Convening and Launch

Though the first phase, the focus was on getting the farmers to participate. The municipality and the mayor were key to getting more than 600 farmer families to actively participate in the initiative. In order to prepare them for the market they were educated on: sustainable agriculture, sales, client service, financial education, banking and on how to use our “A la mano” and our QR code. Both products created to make their transactions easy and successful.

During the launch local and regional media were used to attract and inform about the initiative while regional influencers streamed their experiences. Also, though geolocalization, Waze showed travelers the location of all the farmer stalls close to them. What we wanted was to give travelers the right message at the exact time so that they would stop, purchase and know the farmers directly.

In the 4 day pilot that was Heart Markets more than 260 families were added to the banking system and educated finanacially, in 11 workshops.

Over 7.000 direct transactions were made guaranteeing that farmers for 11 municipalities got 100% of the sales they made that day.

We got 49 million impressions, 9 news outlets talked about Heart Makets, the initiative was aired more than 2.400 times in local radio and our local influencers got over 34.000 impresions