From transfers to transformation: mobile money and the modernization of rice farming in Côte d’Ivoire

In this study, we explore how Mobile Money (MM) adoption influences farm management choices of smallholder rice production in Côte d’Ivoire, a West African context characterised by rich agricultural potential and moderately low digital financial inclusion. Using an endogenous switching regression (ESR) framework to a sample of 1,370 smallholder producers from three rice-producing departments and complemented by an inverse probability weighted regression adjustment (IPWRA) estimator for robustness to estimate the impact of MM on both agricultural intensification (higher fertilizer use), extensification (greater expansion of cultivated areas for food and cash crops outside rice farming system), total rice productivity and better market participation. There is evidence to suggest that remittances may be a plausible channel through which these effects work, by alleviating liquidity constraints, thus allowing clients to invest seasonally in inputs and labor. Our findings extend the mobile money literature, which remains concentrated in East Africa, by providing new evidence from an under-explored West African context, and offers important implications for policies promoting digital financial inclusion as a means of rural transformation.