Based in Dar es Salaam

Loans that smallholder farmers can repay.

Today we work for lenders in Tanzania: we read your agricultural credit files and write the appraisal for your credit committee. We are building services for farmer groups, buyers, insurers and guarantors as well.

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Your credit committee decidesIn Swahili or EnglishEvery figure shows its sourceStarting in Tanzania

Mwikila

ENExample

Written by AI. Not financial advice. The decision is yours.

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Why lending to farmers is hard

An agricultural file needs someone who knows both farming and lending.

Knowing whether a field will produce, and whether the harvest will pay the loan, takes years of farming and years of lending. Few people have both, and none of them can visit every farm. Guarantees, insurance, warehouse receipts and buyer contracts each cover one part of the risk, and each is arranged separately.

The adviser

The experience behind Mwikila

Our mentor Anderson spent close to three decades in banking, most of it in credit, and our mentor Aloys four decades in agricultural production. Mwikila, our AI Senior Agriculture & Finance Consultant, draws on what they know.

Reads every page of the file, including photographed ones
Writes out the reason for each conclusion, so your officer can disagree with it
Shows the page or calculation each figure comes from, and marks what is assumed
Answers questions about any figure

Everyone involved in a farm loan

A farmer's loan involves her group, a buyer, often an insurer or a guarantor, and whoever visits the farm. Today we work only for the lender; what each of the others would get is being built.

Farmers and their groups

Advice in their own language, including for someone starting to farm, and help building a group a lender can lend to.

The insurer and the guarantor

Risk analysis on the loans they insure or guarantee.

The buyer

Their purchase contract weighed in the file, since the sale often repays the loan.

The village-based agronomist

Advises farmers, and checks the plot, the inputs and the deliveries.

The lender

Appraisal, underwriting and risk analysis on agricultural credit files.

Where we are

Credit appraisal is ready today.

We are an early-stage company in Dar es Salaam.

Appraisal

Appraisal of agricultural credit files

Using the evidence in the file, Mwikila answers each question it raises, then writes up the appraisal.

Practice

Practice before the money is at stake

Your officers practise an appraisal from three seats: the borrower's, the officer's and the credit committee's. Mwikila plays the other side and explains where the work was thin, so they learn on practice files before real ones.

Policy

Training on your own credit policy

You write training on your own credit policy and loan products, and we hold it to the same standard as our own, so the way you lend can be taught to every new officer.

Available today

What you get as a lender.

Underwriting and risk analysis

Done on the same file as the appraisal: whether the borrower can repay on time, and what could stop it.

Unread pages named

A page Mwikila could not read is named as unread, and nothing is made up to fill it.

English and Swahili

The appraisal is written in English or Swahili, whichever your officer prefers.

With a lender's officers

Tested on agricultural files with officers from a major agricultural lender that plays a large de-risking role for agricultural loans in Tanzania.

One loan, a group, or your loan book

One farmer's loan, a group loan or all your farm loans, each read against your credit policy.

Being built, not live yet

We are building for everyone else in a farm loan.

Farmer groups, buyers, insurers, guarantors, the agronomists on the farm, and the farmer.

Value chains

The farmer, the input supplier, the buyer and the guarantor will be appraised in one file.

Groups

Helping farmers set up and run a group, with each member's own record kept in the group's file.

On the farm

Village-based agronomists will visit the farm and check the file against what is there, using Mwikila.

Who sees what

Mwikila will work with the farmer, the buyer, the insurer and the guarantor, each in their own language. Everyone involved in a loan will see who else is in it, what each has promised and what has been checked, for as long as the loan runs. A person's private details will be open from the start only to those whose job is to assess them, such as the lender, under signed data and privacy agreements. They will stay closed to everyone else unless that person opens them.

The season

Following the farm and the loan from planting to harvest, so a problem is seen while there is time to act.

Guarantees and contracts in one file

Guarantee schemes, value chain and group lending, warehouse receipts and savings groups already exist in Tanzania. We are building one file where a lender can see all of them together.

Other East African countries

This is a plan. We will go one country at a time, after Tanzania.

Where we go next

Tanzania now, and later the rest of East Africa

We are getting the work right in Tanzania before we go anywhere else.

Now

Tanzania

Tanzania only, and only the lender's side of the chain.

Value chains

Loans through a buyer or a group, appraised in one file.

Then

East Africa

We will take the same service to the other East African countries one at a time, adapted to each country's rules and farming.

Goal

Loans for farmers

A smallholder farmer anywhere in East Africa can borrow on the strength of her group, her buyer and her harvest.

Your first step

Compare our appraisal with your own.

Send a few agricultural files your committee has already decided, and put what we write next to your officers' work. If you are a technology or delivery partner who wants to help us build, get in touch too.

Write to us How it works

Contact

Email the team

Tell us what you lend, insure, guarantee or grow, or how you want to work with us as a partner.

hello@litfin-training.com

Support

Help centre

Questions about a file, your account or getting your institution set up?

Go to the help centre