Zowasel has announced a strategic partnership with SympliFi, a borderless digital lending platform, to facilitate access to affordable agricultural loans for underserved smallholder farmers across the country.
The partnership aims to provide access to instant and affordable credit for smallholder farmers that are not available in the country today.
SympliFi, a U.K.-based fintech company, will develop collateral pools to enable smallholder farmers on the Zowasel platform to instantly access affordable credit from local financial service providers (FSPs).
“We are excited about the opportunity to partner with Zowasel to develop an innovative embedded credit solution to help support the growth of smallholder farmers,” said Maurice Iwunze, chief executive officer of SympliFi in a statement.
“In doing so, we hope to improve rural livelihoods while expanding our product use case in Africa,” he added.
All partners will work together to develop an embedded credit solution for smallholder farmers on the Zowasel platform. The farmers’ transactional data generated on the Zowasel platform will create economic identities for farmers and a credit scorecard for financial service providers (FSPs) to assess risk and make lending decisions.
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Utilizing the Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) model, farmers can use the credit to purchase seeds and fertilizer, agrochemicals, and pay for mechanization services or new tools.
At the end of the growing season, the farmers will sell their harvest on the Zowasel platform and instantaneously repay the credit, a statement said.
The project will kick off as a proof-of-concept (PoC) pilot across selected value chains and locations. The goal of the PoC is to demonstrate how farm and farmer transactional data on the Zowasel platform, combined with an embedded credit solution powered by SympliFi, can help FSPs derisk farmer lending profiles and lower the cost of credit.
Access to affordable credit and a transparent market will enable rural smallholder farmers to boost cultivation and increase their income and quality of life.
“Leveraging farmers’ transactional data will help FSPs in reducing the costs and risks of lending. As mediation of trust, our platform will help smallholder farmers to unlock affordable loans to grow quality crops and trade on our Marketplace,” said Jerry Oche, CEO, Zowasel.
“Zowasel will be bringing its experience in the agricultural value chains to bear by utilizing its existing Marketplace transactional records, and data scoring algorithms to incorporate behavioral metrics to authenticate farmers’ physical or behavioral characteristics to boost loan approvals and reduce the incidence of non-performing loans that exist today.”
