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.
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.
The data – which included information on soil moisture from ESA's SMOS satellite, information on leaf area index from the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission and derived yield estimates for two different crops – were included in FarmDrive’s predictive models for two pilot regions. This was a huge success; FarmDrive continues to use Earth observation data from the Food Security TEP in pre-commercial studies to assess the risk and performance of credits provided to smallholder farmers all over Kenya.