In emerging markets like Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, last-mile distribution depends on one crucial asset: field agents. Whether it’s PAYGO solar, mini-grids, agriculture, e-mobility, or telecom, these agents are the real face of the business, bridging the gap between service providers and communities-making it essential to track agent activity for visibility, accountability and growth.
In 2023 alone, Sub-Saharan Africa’s telecom sector saw a 22% increase in registered field agents, reaching 18.6 million. Yet, only 45% were active each month — exposing a troubling gap between potential reach and real impact.
So why is this happening?
Despite digitization efforts, most field agent networks still operate in the shadows of paper forms, fragmented SMS reports, and chaotic WhatsApp messages.
The result? As seen in sectors like digitization tools & services for farmers, the absence of robust agent activity tracking leads to disconnected operations, missed targets, and stalled growth.
Field service tools must work offline in rural areas and handle complex, fast-paced operations in cities—requiring smart zoning and flexible workflows to ensure efficient, compliant agent activity.
How Upya Solves The Problem
At Upya, we’ve built a platform specifically designed for complex, last-mile field operations. Our agent activity tracking system helps businesses streamline operations, monitor performance, and scale with confidence.
- Workflow automation: automated workflows consolidate commissions, inventory and support tickets with dedicated agent tasks into a single platform. This eliminates the chaos of spreadsheets and scattered communications, streamlining both agent and HQ/field manager performance.
- Centralized, scalable Management: Upya provides a central hub for managing agents, customers, payments and inventory, supporting growth and multi-regional operations of multiple entities-crucial for scaling in both rural and urban environments and polishing the quality of field services.
- Enhanced data quality & compliance: Upya enables validation steps, such as photo verification with GPS and time stamps, to ensure compliance with internal standards and external requirements (e.g., for carbon credits), which are compulsory to approve by field managers.
- Real-time performance monitoring: interactive dashboards and growth analytics allow field teams to instantly identify which agents are active, inactive or underperforming. This enables timely interventions, such as targeted training, performance incentives, or reallocation of resources.
- Geo-tagging & polygon zoning: by integrating GPS location, time stamps and geofencing, Upya ensures that agents’ activities – such as sales, installations or repairs – are logged with precise geographic and temporal data. This not only provides visibility for HQ and field managers but also prevents double-counting and ensures commissions are tied to verified activities within designated zones, especially vital in dense urban areas.
- Offline functionality: recognizing connectivity challenges in both rural and urban peripheries, Upya’s app is designed to work offline, syncing data once a connection is available. This ensures uninterrupted data flow and accurate reporting, even in low- or no-internet environments
Bottom Line
Agent networks are the backbone of last-mile service delivery and quality of field services in emerging markets – both rural and urban. But without robust activity tracking, businesses risk losing visibility, productivity and control, leading to inefficiency, stagnation and lost impact.
Upya empowers distributors to:
💡 Digitise field operations
📈 Improve agent productivity
🛠️ Automate workflows
🔍 Ensure data quality
🌍 Scale across regions — both rural and urban
📣 Ready to transform your agent network?
Whether you are managing last-mile solar distribution, coordinating battery swaps in a growing e-mobility network, delivering agricultural inputs to rural farmers, or tracking smartphone payments across Africa, and LATAM, Upya gives you the visibility, automation, and control to digitize and scale your operations—no matter your sector or geography.
👉 Book a demo today and explore how agent activity tracking can unlock growth for your operations.