Sabah

Hill-paddy farmers in Sabah grow and trade rice across remote terrain, often with limited connectivity and basic phones.

Their sales, payments and crop movement are real, but rarely recorded in a way farmers can use to prove their history.

I expected that the AXK approach could be carried over directly: the same record, a different crop.

The fields carried over; the interface didn't. On feature phones over USSD, every step had to be short, forgiving and understandable without a screen full of context.

Identity turned out to be the hardest field. A record is only as useful as the confidence that it belongs to the right farmer, so identity issuance became part of the pilot itself.

A hill-paddy pilot combining USSD access, identity issuance for farmers and escrow payments, so that a sale, its payment and the movement of the crop could be tied to the same person.

The partnership with UNDP Malaysia is documented in UNDP's New Tech, New Partners (2026), page 92.

1,000

farmers onboarded

≈ $500K

in rice volume

The question travels, but the constraints don't. Representation has to be designed around the conditions in which evidence is actually produced.

Sabah confirmed that the problem wasn't specific to East African trade. It is a general problem of turning informal activity into durable records.