Anikita: Before the Wireframes
The first post argued that Filipino farmers are connected enough for a mobile-first web app. This one covers what I designed on top of that evidence: the first full version of the Anikita case study, before anyone outside the project had seen it.
Anikita is a concept for a farmer-to-consumer marketplace in the Philippines. The pitch sounds familiar. Farmers list their harvest, consumers buy it, fewer hands take a cut in between. Versions of that idea already exist here, some well funded, one run by the government itself. So the case study couldn't stop at "farmers need an app to sell online." It had to answer a harder question: why do farmers stay in selling relationships that visibly underpay them, and what would a product have to do differently?
The research gave a sharper answer than I expected.
The Problem Underneath the Problem
The underpayment is well documented. Farmers are among the poorest basic sectors in the Philippines at 27% poverty incidence, a figure that has barely moved in 15 years [1]. Retail prices have run as much as 240% above what farmers are paid at the farm gate, and even after inter-island transport improved, the gap stayed near 180% [2]. In 2025, the farmgate price of palay fell to ₱17.7 per kilo, a three-year low, while retail rice prices stayed comparatively high [3].
But the finding that reshaped the project was about credit, not price. Many farmers are tenants without land titles. No title means no collateral, and no collateral means no bank loan. Their only accessible source of credit is often the same trader who buys their harvest, and that credit comes bundled with an obligation to sell to that trader at that trader's price [4]. When typhoons wipe out a crop, informal lenders with punishing rates are the only fallback. One rice farmer, interviewed after Typhoon Lando destroyed his harvest, described himself as "condemned to die in debt" [5].
That finding set the design constraint for everything else. A platform that only offers better prices will not be adopted by the farmers who need it most, because they cannot afford to leave the trader relationship. Better prices are the entry ticket. The actual product has to address cash flow.
Two People, One Trust Gap
The case study is built around two research-grounded personas on opposite ends of the same problem.
Mang Ric, 52, is a tenant rice farmer in Nueva Ecija working 1.8 hectares, typical of the nearly nine in ten Philippine farm holdings under three hectares [6]. His trader sets both the price of his harvest and the interest on his debt. Quality grading feels arbitrary and is never explained. He shares a basic Android phone with his household, avoids anything that needs a lot of typing, and has been burned by "better deal" schemes before. His quote drove the farmer-side design: "Just tell me what I actually earn, not just the price I'm handed."
Andrea, 31, is a marketing associate in Quezon City who has read the farmgate-price stories and wants her grocery spending to mean something. She has also been burned, by "support local farmers" apps that were slow and vague about where the money went. She isn't asking for sentiment. She's asking for a receipt: "I want to know the produce I'm buying actually helped the farmer, not just the app in the middle."
He needs proof the platform won't repeat the trader's pattern. She needs proof her money actually reaches him. Every core feature has to serve both sides of that gap at once.
The Decisions That Followed
A web app instead of a native app. This is where the first post in this series does its work. Anikita is a mobile-first Progressive Web App. A link or QR code opens it in the browser, so there's no app-store download eating into a limited data budget and no storage cost on a cheap phone. A cooperative representative can run it from a shared computer at the barangay hall. The tradeoffs (offline sync reliability, how browser voice APIs behave on cheap Android devices) are logged in the case study as items to validate rather than hand-waved.
Voice-first listing. Ric lists a harvest by photographing the produce and recording a short voice note with the quantity, price, and harvest date in Tagalog, Cebuano, or another supported language. The transcription is shown back to him in large, editable text before anything goes live. No long forms and no assumed fluency.
A price that locks at purchase. The moment a consumer buys, the farmer's price is locked and shown to him before the order is finalized. It can't be renegotiated, and it doesn't depend on an unexplained grading decision. Arbitrary pricing was Ric's single biggest complaint about traders, so the order confirmation screen puts the confirmed price first, in the largest type on the screen.
An escrow wallet with a visible ledger. The consumer's payment is held until delivery is confirmed, then released to the farmer's in-app wallet, with cash-out to GCash, Maya, or a bank. Andrea's checkout shows an itemized breakdown of farmer payout, delivery fee, and platform fee. After delivery she sees the settled result for that specific transaction: "Your purchase paid Mang Ric ₱X directly."
A path to credit that isn't a trader. Because of the debt finding, the case study includes a cash-advance feature tied to a farmer's transaction history. It's a visible option that grows with use rather than an opaque loan product. It's also the case study's biggest honestly-flagged assumption: the lending partner, underwriting model, and terms are all undefined. I'd argue it's the single most important open item in the project.
An SMS path that mirrors the app. For farmers with no smartphone or no data budget, a text-message menu mirrors the same five-part structure as the web app: list a harvest ("Palay, 500kg, 20"), check orders, check the wallet, cash out, reach support. A farmer moving between a borrowed smartphone and his own basic phone shouldn't have to learn two different products.
What Already Exists
The competitive review names real players: Mayani, MooMart, DELIVER-e — which reportedly helped some 600 farmers double their income while cutting food waste from 50% to 5% [7] — and Kadiwa, the Department of Agriculture's own farmer-to-consumer program, complete with a digital ordering arm [8]. A government-backed platform explicitly built to eliminate middlemen is the most credible "why not just use what exists" question this project has to answer.
Based on public documentation, none of them design for offline or SMS access, none offer credit or cash-advance support, and most assume either an organized cooperative behind the farmer or a baseline of digital access. The underserved user is the solo smallholder: older, less connected, not part of an NGO-backed group. That's Ric, and that's the gap Anikita sits in.
What I Deliberately Left Open
A case study is more credible when it shows its edges, so version one ends with the questions the research can't answer from a desk:
- Who actually provides the credit, and on what terms?
- How are disputes resolved? By the platform, or by a cooperative or field partner?
- What's the minimum viable scope of the SMS path: listing only, or the full loop through payment?
- Should Anikita be NGO or government funded and free to use, or sustained by a small, clearly disclosed transaction fee?
At this point the flows were ready to move into wireframes. Before drawing a single screen, though, I wanted the concept stress-tested by people with no stake in it and no supply-chain vocabulary. A cheap, fast gut check before committing design time.
Sources
- Philippine Statistics Authority, "Poverty Incidence Declined from 2021 to 2023 in Ten Basic Sectors"
- Asian Development Bank, "Farmers are Rolling On and Rolling Off to Increased Revenue in the Philippines"
- BusinessMirror, "PSA: 2025 palay farmgate price falls to ₱17.7 a kilo, a 3-year low"
- PIDS, "Towards a More Sustainable Financing of Small Farmers and Fisherfolks"
- Rappler, "Farmers lose debt gamble in typhoon-plagued Philippines"
- Inquirer Opinion, "Small farms, large farms"
- BIMP-EAGA, "New Portal Connects Filipino Farmers with Consumers"
- Department of Agriculture, "DA's KADIWA continues to bring safe and affordable food in Metro Manila"
Read on Medium or follow on LinkedIn for work in progress.