Group finance works because members know one another, save together and stand behind one another's loans. The same arrangement is what makes a group hard to appraise. The lender sees the group. It rarely sees who farms what, who has delivered and who is carrying whom.
What we are building
In design and early build, and not live yet:
- ●Support for farmers to form and run groups a lender can finance, with a record the group keeps as it goes
- ●Every member visible beneath the group, so a loan to the group rests on evidence about the people in it
Group files today
LitFin Intelligence already appraises group files as agricultural credit files, on the evidence each one holds, in English and Swahili. What it cannot yet do is look beneath the group. Until it can, the lender decides on what the file shows.