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In its next phase of algorithm development, FarmDrive seeks to expand the environmental arm of the algorithm by incorporating more alternative data-sets, including satellite imagery and remote sensing data. They are currently engaging with Planet, a satellite company from Silicone Valley, and The Impact Lab, a Chicago-based data analytics firm to analyze the possibilities of using satellite images in predicting a farmer’s creditworthiness.In addition, FarmDrive also plans to use these environmental data-sets, in combination with crop cycle data to predict seasonal yield and influence agricultural insurance products.The startup also uses machine learning in generating the farmer’s profile by learning from the farmer’s input. Data points about the farmer’s behaviour, education level, and their interaction with the app are all analyzed to contribute to the farmers profile score.

Smallholder farmers, especially in Kenya face difficulties when it comes to accessing loans and financing from banks and other financial institutions. The agricultural sector is the backbone to Kenya’s economy, yet banks have very little incentive to work with farmers.

FarmDrive founded in 2014 has built an innovative solution that provides “detailed risk profiles of smallholder farmers to financial institutions”. FarmDrive does this through a credit score, generated by an algorithm developed by the team, in-house. The algorithm relies on data-sets collected from the farmers through their mobile phones, alternative data and machine learning.

AgroCenta is an agricultural technology platform that focuses on using technology to provide market access to smallholder farmers in Ghana. Their primary objective is to promote and facilitate fair trade for smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa by connecting them directly to larger and structured markets. It thus connects them to large, medium and small businesses in order to sell to breweries, food manufacturers and processing industries without intermediaries. The different digital services the company provides in the fields are “Agro-Trade”, “Agro-Pay”, “Agro-Logistics” and “Agro-Information”. By improving the logistical process and removing exploitative buying from the value chain, smallholder farmers can sell at competitive prices and improve their financial livelihood.

We have seen improvements in farmers’ livelihoods because we give them a fair price for the commodities they produce and help them with better farming practices so they increase their yields. Seeing farmers being able to pay school fees for their families has given us joy about what we do. Agriculture is the space we should be in. Before AgroCenta farmers were selling to middle men at sometimes ridiculously low prices for maize, for instance. At the time a middle man would buy a 50 kg bag of maize for US$9 (40 cedis) and we would buy it for US$11 (49 cedis). We deal mostly in maize, sorghum and soya beans and have a five year contract with a big organisation that has a constant demand for these commodities. In 2016 we sponsored 400 farmers, the majority of whom were women. We provided them with seed, fertilisers and tractor services. These farmers had an assured market. Everything they produced got purchased by us at prevailing market prices, enabling them sell quickly and earning higher.

Financial inclusion, from my personal perspective, is the creation of value added services for the disadvantaged in the society. From the concept of Barefoot Banking to digital innovations, financial inclusion bridges the inequality financial gap that exists between the rural and the urban settings. My personal mission is to make it possible for the smallholder farmer who lives in the most remote parts of Ghana receive payment for his goods and services through a digital solution.

The Fintech space in Ghana is gradually picking up steam with active participation from the public and private sectors. Government regulations on e-money and mobile money technologies are favourable and aiding adoption and rolling out of new technologies every day targeted at the unbanked population. Out of the 6 major telecommunication companies operating in Ghana, 4 are mobile money enabled, facilitating financial transactions between businesses and consumers. Banks also have rolled out services that target financial inclusions. These positive tides are helping shape the Fintech landscape in Ghana.

FarmDrive, a Kenyan data analytics startup helping smallholder farmers in Africa access credit from local banks, has raised funding from the venture arm of Safaricom, the biggest communication company in East and Central Africa, Safaricom Spark Venture Fund.

FarmDrive - EWB Canada

FarmDrive uses data analytics to connect smallholder farmers with financial institutions and credit, enabling crops and farmers to flourish. And all through a mobile phone.

FarmDrive uses data analytics and mobile technology to create financial profiles for farmers through a credit scoring model. When the financial institutions can view comprehensive profiles of a farmer’s economic performance, they are more likely to approve loans.By unlocking access to credit, FarmDrive enables smallholder farmers to access: Loans to purchase vital tools and assets. Insurance to bolster to protect against the natural seasonal vulnerabilities of farm work. Comprehensive financial profiles of their farming operations: a useful resource in scaling to service multiple partners or larger supply chains.

Since 2017, AgroCenta has successfully completed two rounds of funding to the tune of $750,000 to expand operations in Ghana. In 2017, AgroCenta won the Seedstars Global Competition against other 72 startups from emerging markets across the globe. AgroCenta has grown its farmer base to 45,000 providing additional services of access to finance for smallholder farmers, bringing smallholder farmers onto the financial sector to enjoy services such as crop insurance, micro lending/input financing, mobile payments through mobile money and finally pensions schemes targeted at farmers and beneficiaries in the informal sector with special attention to women and youth. Since 2017, AgroCenta has helped over 28,000 farmers sell over 20,000MT of commodities to large, medium and small scale buyers across the country.   In December 2018, AgroCenta won a grant of $250,000 from GSMA Ecosystem Accelerator Fund to further build its financial inclusion platform AgroPay targeted at rural smallholder farmers.

Across the globe, smallholder farmers lose between $50 billion and $100 billion annually, often from natural disasters, but reportedly only 1% is insured from these accidents. As an example, in Feburary 2019, the company made several payouts to farmers in Kenya as poor rainfall caused large amount of crop failure.

Jason Schapiro, WorldCover Lead Engineer, said “Our algorithms are specifically calibrated to rainfall events by region and crop type, automatically triggering instant payouts to insured farmers through mobile money services like M-Pesa.”

AgroCenta has hosted and provided over 500 farmer engagement sessions and trainings since launch. Skilled professionals deliver these sessions in farming communities and methodologies are continuously updated to reflect state-of-theart farming practices.

This FinTech startup founded by two Kenyan women is positioned to reach 3 million smallholder farmers in Kenya in the next 5 years.

FD uses mobile technology, predictive modelling, AI and a customer first approach to democratize access to loans to all farmers; ensuring farmers can apply for a loan from any type of phone and receive a decision on their loan application in seconds. FD has achieved this by building multiple channels of access and a fully automated lending process.

Previously, FD received $50,000 USD of early-stage seed funding from EWB Canada to develop their platform and prove to financial service providers that smallholder farmers are profitable clients.

At Pula, we are radically restructuring agricultural insurance, using technology to insure the previously unbanked, uninsured, untapped market of 1.5 billion smallholders worldwide. We work in nine countries across Africa and Asia, and in 2017 alone, we facilitated crop and livestock insurance cover to 611,000 farmers in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Malawi.

Pula uses satellite data and farm yield measurements to understand how weather patterns affect a smallholder farmer’s yield, and uses this information to automate compensation in case of loss. The company also provides farmers with targeted agronomic advice via SMS messaging, helping them grow more from their existing landholdings.

Insurtech startup Pula announced today that it has closed a seed funding round to advance its efforts to provide insurance to smallholder farmers in Africa and South Asia.

Funding Pula: Insuretech Startup Closes $6M Series A Funding to Scale Up Business Across Africa 0 SharesShareTweetSharePin The African Insuretech service provider, Pula, has recently closed a US$6 million Series A funding round led by TLcom Capital and had participation from Women’s World Banking. It specializes in digital as well as agric insurance to derisk smallholder farmers across Africa. This new round of investment to the insuretech startup will be used to scale up operations in the company’s existing 13 markets across Africa. Pula has so far impacted over 4.3 million farmers on the continent and the new funding will help push its expansion into Asia to power resilience and profitability for Asian smallholder farmers. Pula was launched by Rose Goslinga and Thomas Njeru in 2015, to design and deliver innovative agricultural insurance and digital products to help smallholders farmers improve their farming practices, endure climate risks and bolster their incomes. This has become necessary because for smallholder farmers in emerging markets, the traditional method of calculating insurance through farm visits is often expensive, meaning they are often neglected from financial protection against climate risks.

“The digital nature of the product can be seen as exacerbating the usual challenges of ICT illiteracy. However, FarmDrive presents the record-keeping platform in different languages  – it’s now available in English and Kiswahili – via a simple SMS to increase the uptake of record-keeping among rural farmers. So farmers don’t have to have a smartphone,” Bosire says.“It also emerged during our pilot that farmers feel more empowered if they can their mobile phones for other activities apart from for calling, texting and mobile money. Their openness to  embracing new ways of using their simple mobile phones to solve challenges is what drives the culture shift from keeping non-organized farm records on paper or none at all  to digital record keeping,” she says.

Enterprise Trustees Limited has launched a partnership with Agrocenta, a digital food distribution platform, to provide retirement solutions as a value addition to small holder farmers in Afram Plains of Ghana.Under the scheme, farmers will make voluntary personal pension contributions during the harvesting seasons from the sale of their produce to Agrocenta.  The benefits will include lump sum payouts, periodic withdrawals and a life insurance cover.Agrocenta currently works with about 46,000 farmers across several regions in Ghana. These farmers will be assisted by Agrocenta field officers to enroll onto the Pensions Scheme via a USSD shortcode at the community level. 

We design and deliver best in class agriculture index insurance products to protect farmers

Pula handles end to end management of the delivery of insurance to farmers, including field operations, farmer onboarding/education and claims assessment and payouts.

AgroCenta provides an end-to-end solution for smallholder farmers in the post-harvest value chain from farm to market, leveraging on technology to create impact. AgroCenta's services include a market linkage platform (AgroTrade) linking farmers directly to buyers and removing exploitative buying, TruckR which is an on-demand trucks and logistics services (uber for trucks), AgroPay which is a financial inclusion plaform for the rural unbanked smallholder farmer.

FarmDrive is a tech-driven social enterprise working at the intersection of technology, agriculture and finance. FarmDrive is improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in Africa by using new technology and alternative data to increase availability of capital; mitigating both financial and operational risks while creating shared value for other players in the value chain.

FarmDrive understands smallholder farmers uniquely through dynamic datasets and translates this to financial institutions. More than 50 million smallholder farmers in Africa are struggling to make a living due to lack of capital to improve their farming activities.

FarmDrive has developed a platform that gathers data on smallholder farmers both from the ‘ground’ and ‘data from the sky’. FarmDrive uses sophisticated algorithms to turn that data into comprehensive credit profiles of “unbanked and underbanked” smallholders who have little access to credit.

We believe we can bring parametric insurance to the worldBuilding our product from the ground up, five years ago we started by selling simple weather insurance to smallholder farmers in Africa via agents and in-person marketing - selling over 30,000 policies direct to farmers. Since those days, we have incorporated digital marketing, scaled our technology and sold our policies to customers around the world.We want to help high value crop growers manage their financial risk to climate change, unpredictable weather and natural disasters.WorldCover’s product vision is for commercial farmers to experience parametric insurance in a way that is easy to understand (simple), engenders trust (transparent), and fits them well at any size (tailored).

Farmers in emerging markets face challenges with low productivity. Due to the risks they face from ongoing climate change, pests and diseases, farmers struggle to find financial stability. Pula is at the center of an ecosystem that helps them manage their risks with insurance and digital solutions.