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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.

Compared to existing empirical evidence on the impacts of digital technologies on African firms, the quantitative analysis hereafter presented incorporates various novelties.

As early as 2016, established banking and mobile phone companies were competing alongside specialist start-ups to become leaders in fintech, especially in Africa.In November last year, Nairobi-headquartered Prime Bank launched an international money transfer service in collaboration with London-headquartered SimbaPay, giving Prime Bank customers in Kenya access to mobile payments.

The chatbot will also enable 24/7 instant customer service for its customers across Africa and Europe. Daniel Howard, CTO for SimbaPay, says: “Another major objective we achieved with the chatbot service is that it also works without internet. This means customers with a mobile phone, even a basic phone without internet access, can access the SimbaPay chatbot using SMS.” Together with Interswitch, SimbaPay says its B2B division offers its instant remittance technology to banks and telcos who want to provide their customers with the service. To send money with an SMS users need the recipient’s phone number and the chatbot will automatically obtain the recipient bank account or mobile money details.

Millions of people in developing countries depend on microloans to raise the funds to grow a business or just stay afloat in hard times. And thanks to digital platforms, smartphones and free-moving global capital, growing numbers of people in the rich world are using their money to lift others out of poverty.

But the reality is often a lot messier – something that may not initially be obvious to the lender. In fact, like Cabusog and Lendwithcare, borrowers and crowdfunding sites connect via local partner microfinance institutions (MFIs) who do the essential work of assessing creditworthiness and administering loans. To pay for that, most MFIs charge interest to borrowers, often at wildly varying rates.

Kiva is the slickest of the microfunding websites, offering a mind-bogglingly glossy catalogue of projects sorted into different categories, countries and attributes, all illustrated with backstories and pictures.

Omidyar Network will match up to $2 million of online donations from individual Kiva lenders. Amy Klement, Vice President, Investments at Omidyar Network, will join Kiva’s board of directors.

Kiva will use the funding to further develop its technology platform, expand its network of field partners, and continue to invest in due diligence and monitoring capabilities across its growing portfolio. The commitment, which marks the largest grant in Kiva’s history, reflects Omidyar Network’s focus on bringing microfinance to underserved markets as well as catalyzing social impact through technology.

"Our commitment of up to $1 million in funding to address the growing wealth inequality in the United States is not only the right thing to do, but a necessity,"

Kiva's crowdfunding platform, Kiva.org, allows individuals to lend as little as $25 to make a difference in someone's life. Kiva Protocol aims to establish financial identity and credit history for unbanked populations using distributed ledger technology (DLT), with its inaugural project currently being implemented in Sierra Leone.

The club’s decade-long KIVA lending portfolio exceeded $83,000 last week. KIVA is a micro-lending organization. Of the total loan value of $83,150, about $12,000 has been collected via loose change cups at meetings; the rest is comprised of paybacks, with interest.

All but one of the seven loans – typically of $100 each – were made to individual entrepreneurs in construction. To date, the club has made 849 loans in 72 countries. Just under half of the loans have been made to agricultural endeavors, another 20 percent to manufactures and construction, followed by food production. Fifty-five percent of the recipients have been women. 

Kiva, a nonprofit founded in 2005, has chosen to make Waco a “Kiva Hub,” the first city in Texas to receive such a designation

He welcomed small business needing a loan up to $15,000 to contact Startup Waco, headquartered at 605 Austin Ave.

The Waco City Council gave the local Kiva Hub a financial kick-start, awarding it a $50,000 grant. Passavant said he hopes to approach individuals and foundations about putting additional money behind Kiva.

You’ve probably heard of Kiva, but if you aren’t among the 1.7 million people who have made loans on the platform, you may not really know what it is. This crowdfunding platform is, in effect, a bank funded by people who lend their money with an expectation of losing only a little, to 2.9 million people who stand to gain a lot.

Today, Kluge serves as an advisor on Kiva’s leadership council. Kiva’s senior investment manager for refugees and displaced populations, Lev Plaves, serves on the steering committee for the Refugee Investment Network.

The fund provided $5 million in loans to more than 8,000 refugees and yielded something that is almost invaluable: data. The fund proved that refugees are just as likely as most—and more likely than some—to repay their loans, making way for more loans and economic support for this particularly vulnerable population.

Today, we’re proud to introduce a new look and feel for Kiva, and a new, mobile-responsive website that makes supporting small businesses around the world easier than ever.

When Kiva began in 2005, we had a simple goal: to connect borrowers who need small amounts of capital to improve their lives, with lenders who want to help.

Kiva’s grown into a true global community, where people come together to support and believe in each other. That's part of the story we hope to capture with our new imagery.

Kiva has been awarded $2.5 million from the W-GDP Fund at USAID in an effort to identify innovative approaches to catalyze commercial investment for women’s economic empowerment and equality.

The Kiva Capital team will use this innovative funding to launch a comprehensive fund design and structuring process. This will include the development of an impact framework and a shared learnings platform.

Kiva has promoted itself as a link between individual lenders in the developed world and individual borrowers in the developing world, allowing visitors to its Web site to learn about and lend money to people in poor nations seeking small loans for specific purposes.

the loans made by individual lenders through the Kiva site do not actually end up in the pockets of individual borrowers. Instead, those loans are aggregated and used to backstop microfinance institutions that have already paid out microloans to the borrowers featured on the site.

Kiva president Premal Shah said he could foresee a day when Kiva really did provide a direct person-to-person connection, once certain legal hurdles are cleared and as more individuals in the developing world began using mobile phones to access credit and make electronic payments. In the meantime, the organization has changed the wording on its homepage from "Kiva lets you lend to a specific entrepreneur, empowering them to lift themselves out of poverty" to "Kiva connects people through lending to alleviate poverty."

he London-based digital money transfer services SimbaPay has now launched a new money remittance services that will purely operate via SMS. That means even people with no internet and using just a feature phone can now use SimbaPay to send or receive money. This is a huge step for the company, as it now enters a bigger pool of users, both with smartphones plus internet access combined with those without smartphones and/or not internet access. The new SimbaPay SMS money remittance services went live yesterday, and now users from around the world can use the service on any device from anywhere via the good-old SMS. The new SMS service is powered by artificial intelligence that has seen SimbaPay integrate a chatbot at the other end of the user.

We work across Africa and Asia, and in 2019 alone, we facilitated crop and livestock insurance cover to 1.1mln farmers and have offered our products in 11 markets from Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, and Mozambique. Since starting in 2015 our products have reached over 3.4mln households. Our Founders work in insurance has been recognized by several international awards including the Financial Times/IFC Award for Sustainable Finance, the Singapore Fintech Festival, Womens World Banking, Credit Suisse, and InsureTech3.0.

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.

“Businesses, as well as Kenyans and expatriates with friends and family abroad, send over US$18 billion to other African countries, Asia and Europe annually with several billion Kenya Shillings going through the Simbapay network. Therefore, this service will offer Prime Bank’s customers a world-class fully digital international money transfer service,” added Karanja.

Prime Bank’s Director for Business Development, Vijay Kantaria, said the tier 2 lender has embarked on investment in technology through partnering with various FinTechs to accelerate its digital integration plan.

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.