Credit scoring for agriculture

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.

Life as a smallholder farmer is tough; it is difficult to predict how well your crops will grow each year and investing in quality inputs is expensive. Life becomes even more difficult when you are denied loans or offered exorbitantly high interest rates because lenders are not able to assess the risks associated with lending you money. This leaves you unbanked and underserved, and leaves lenders with an enormous gap in their potential client base.

FarmDrive uses a variety of data, including on economics, agronomics and the environment, to build up credit profiles for famers and enable them to access financial services. As part of the Food Security TEP, between 2018 and 2019 Vista Remote Sensing in Geosciences GmbH explored how Earth observation satellite data could support FarmDrive in its ambitions.