Group items tagged

Pula uses insurance and digital products to help smallholder farmers endure climate risks, improve their farming practices, and bolster their incomes over time. LEARN MORE

“I hope that Pula continues in the future and that we can continue to improve our future through its benefits.” Festus Mutio, farmer, Kitui County, Kenya

Across Pula’s eight African markets, insurance penetration rates are typically less than 5 percent. Pula innovates to improve this. The farmers realize that insurance is useful, but they are not willing to pay its upfront cost.

Founded in 2015, AgroCenta is an online sales solution for smallholder farmers, with two offerings – supply chain platform AgroTrade, and financial inclusion service AgroPay.

Disrupt Africa reported yesterday AgroCenta was one of six African startups awarded non-equity funding by the GSMA Ecosystem Accelerator. Though the startup’s co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Francis Obirikorang declined to disclose the breakdown of equity versus grant cash, Disrupt Africa can confirm that the GSMA input is worth around US$250,000. Obirikorang said the funds will be used to scale up AgroCenta’s operations in Ghana, while the GSMA grant is more specifically geared towards the AgroPay platform, which provides any smallholder farmer who has traded using AgroTrade with a financial statement they can use to get access to finance.

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.”

Robert is a father of four and lives in the rural areas at the outskirts of Tamale, in northern Ghana. He lives off his one hectare of land where he grows maize and groundnuts. He sells part of it to the local market and eats the rest with his family. Like many of the 475 million smallholder farmers around the world, he faces constant threats of droughts or other weather hazards that can destroy his family’s main source of subsistence: Crops. Ninety percent of farmers in Africa have no access to crop insurance or other safety net.

WorldCover addresses this problem by providing farmers with simple and affordable microinsurance policies, insuring their crops against the risk of drought. Microinsurance and farmers receive rapid payout in cases of drought during the crop growth period. WorldCover ran a full pilot project in 2015 among Rice and Sorghum farmers and signed up a significant number of farmers, with many more committed.

FarmDrive generates real-time credit reports for smallholder farmers, allowing them to access loans. Their proprietary platform collects traditional and alternative data points like revenue and satellite imaging to create detailed yield estimates and assess credit risk and then delivers loans via mobile money. As a result, farmers can increase their crop yields, improve their incomes and invest their additional revenue back into their families and communities.

Pula, a five-year old insurtech startup, provides small scale farmers with agricultural insurance to help manage the risk of enduring extreme conditions. Insurtech is one of the fast-growing sub-sectors of the fintech, which has booming with investors in African startups.

Pula will also be expanding to Asia, targeting smallholder farmers as it has in Africa, with a focus on Philippines, Thailand, Turkey, and Pakistan. “What we’ve realized is that African solutions are in no way inferior to Asian, European solutions

Since it was founded in 2015, Pula has impacted 4.3 million farmers across 13 African markets. Goslinga says key to Pula’s business model is helps insurance companies better understand the risks of small scale farming.With an average premium subscription of $4 for small-scale farmers in Africa, Pula actually markets the insurance product to banking partners rather than directly to farmers. The banks make the insurance mandatory before they approve loans to the farmers.

Two thirds of the African population work in agriculture, yet just 1% of commercial loans go to the sector, and very few of these are allocated to smallholder farmers. Kenyan company FarmDrive is using data from ESA's Food Security Thematic Exploitation Platform (TEP) to help smallholder farmers access the funds they need.

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.

In addition to the validated farm-level data collected through the app, FarmDrive also collects big data from satellite companies, weather stations, government agencies, and more. Using these aggregated data, the model generates credit scores and provides automated decisioning tools that enable financial institutions to develop loan products that fit the economic and agronomic needs of smallholder farmers.

In 2016 FarmDrive completed the initial phase of product-market fit in partnership with a Kenyan MFI. Through this pilot over KES 15 mil (USD 150,000) in loans were disbursed throughout 16 counties in Kenya. The pilot served as a proof point that better risk assessment can unlock capital for smallholder farmers, and informs the product development we’re doing today to drive more capital to farmers

FinTech Innovation Challenge “Making Finance Work for Women 2019” Award! Pula is an agriculture insurance provider for smallholder farmers in African emerging markets lead by CEO and cofounder Rose Goslinga. They are radically restructuring agricultural insurance, using technology to insure the previously unbanked, uninsured, untapped market of 1.5 billion smallholders worldwide.

Pula is providing radically restructured agriculture insurance for smallhold farmers in Africa. Using satellite technology and data to provide previously uninsured landowners with a better safety net, Pula policies are free for the farmers. Premiums are paid by input companies or farm aggregators whose business interests are served by protecting farmers’ incomes.

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).

It is estimated that the Agricultural sector in Africa contributes over 40 percent of GDP but receives less than 4 percent bank lending because of inadequate personal assets. The dynamic duo through FarmDrive have thus built a platform for smallholder farmers who didn’t have financial identities before to enable them access loans easily.

Their Founders work in agriculture insurance has been recognized by several international awards including the Financial Times/IFC Award for Sustainable Finance. They work with Fortune 500 Companies, Global NGO’s, Microfinance Instructions, Research Institutions, and Governments to help provide smallholders the protection they need in an increasingly unpredictable climate.

The new insurance product called Area Yield Index Insurance (AYII) by Pula Insurance will mitigate various risks being faced by smallholder farmers and is expected to cater for 14 million bags of fertilizers, among other insurance products for 3.9 million farmers by next year, and then 19 million farmers by 2025.

AgroCenta brings the shareholders in Ghana’s agricultural value chain under one umbrella. Focusing on the producers, rural smallholder farmers, the company has developed a web and mobile platform that provides rural farmers with a suite of services to empower them to sell their crops at fair-market prices. AgroCenta’s platform, which is includes SMS functionality, provides the following services: 1) AgroInfo: real-time commodity pricing information; 2) TruckR: an on-demand logistics solution; 3) AgroTrade: a market platform to offer crops for sale; and 4) AgroPay: a mobile-money based payments service. The company markets its platform leveraging an intimate knowledge of the African cultural context and recruiting and technologically empowering village chiefs to act as advocates or agents for the platform.