The reading
How we read an agricultural credit file, page by page.
Reading the file is the first of three parts you can use today. The appraisal and the record your institution keeps come after it.
A smallholder's credit file is whatever the farmer and the group had: a bank statement scanned crooked, a handwritten ledger of deliveries, a weighbridge ticket photographed on a phone, a forwarded email with attachments, an archive compressed to make it easier to send.
When a page cannot be read, we say which page and why. A credit officer looks there first.
Opening
Each file is opened to see what it is, whatever its name says.
In the field a file name is often wrong: a photograph saved with a spreadsheet extension, an upload that a browser declares as an unknown type, a message exported from a phone with no extension at all.
We go by what is inside the file, not by its name or the type the sender gave it. Software that trusts the name can hand back an empty document as if it had been read, and nothing after that can tell.
A forwarded email is read as a document, with its body and every attachment. An archive is opened and every file inside it is read.
A file of a kind we cannot read is named and counted. No page is skipped quietly: it is read, or it is named.
Photographed pages
Most of a farmer's credit file is photographs of paper.
Much of the evidence was printed, signed, stamped and then photographed, so there is no text to copy from it. We read the photograph of the page and keep each word where it sits on the sheet.
Knowing where each word sits lets us rebuild tables and find stamps.
Tables are rebuilt from the spacing.
Columns are recovered from where the words sit, and a table that runs over a page break is joined into one table, not two halves that fail to add up.
Everything on the page is recorded where it sits.
Signatures, stamps and seals, letterheads and logos, handwritten annotations, form layouts, maps and plans, charts and figures.
A stamp found on page nine can be quoted, checked against that page and shown to your committee. A note saying only that there is a stamp somewhere cannot.
Authenticity
A statement that has been read still has to be checked.
A document can be complete, legible and wrong, by error or by intent. Neither shows to software that only copies the text off the page.
So each statement is compared with the rest of its own document, and anything that does not agree is reported. We do not publish the checks, apart from the identifier check below, for the reason a lender does not publish its own back-office checks: they are only as useful as they are unpredictable.
Where a file carries Tanzanian identifiers, we check that each one is built the way it should be, and that a registration, certificate or licence number has the form its stated issuer uses.
What comes back is a finding, for example that this figure, at this line, does not agree with the rest of the document. Your officer can take it up with the applicant and settle it. We draw no conclusion about the applicant from it, and the decision stays with your officer and your credit committee.
Unread pages
Each page we could not read is named.
Each time we read a file, we say whether all of it was read. If it was not, we list the pages that could not be read.
A document not reached within the time allowed and a document that is genuinely unreadable are different facts. Reporting the second when the first is true sends an officer looking for another copy of a file that was fine.
When only part of a file is read, you are told which pages were not read, how many items were missed, of what kind, and why. The reason is always specific, never just that an error occurred.
An appraisal built on nine of forty pages can be sound. One that presents itself as built on forty is not.
That list tells your officer exactly what the appraisal is based on, so they can act on it.
Language
A bilingual file is read as it arrives.
A Tanzanian agricultural file is often bilingual: an English facility letter, a Swahili group resolution, a handwritten delivery note. You do not need to put a file into one language before sending it.
A passage we cannot make out goes on the list of unread pages too, with the pages it is on and the reason.
Related pages
- What the committee reads
What comes after the reading: the questions the file raises, the credit memo, and the answer sent back to whoever sent the file.
- The record you keep
The record of how the file was worked, which stays with your institution.
- What we do not do
Where reading stops, and what else we do not do.