peris bosire
As a young girl growing up in a small, impoverished farming community in rural Kenya Peris witnessed the frustrations her family s and the community faced in agriculture. Their harvests were meager and there they did not have the capital to critical farming inputs that could increase their yields and revenues.
In 2014, 6 months after her graduating with a first class honors from SCI, farm drive was born in partnership with a fellow graduate Rita. Its main purpose was to bridge the gap between smallholder farmers and financial institutions.
Peris together with co founder Rita
According to Bosire, the underlying problem is that there is very little aggregated data about smallholder farmers, nor about their financial performance and history. The lack of data makes it difficult for financial institutions to conduct credit assessments on farmers; hence they are viewed as high risk, locking them out of formal financial systems.
Farm Drive, is an innovative credit-scoring model that can be used by financial providers to assess the creditworthiness of small-scale farmers, and ultimately give more of them access to financing to increase their yields and production. As well as save some of their earnings.
Farm Drive provides a simple digital record-keeping platform that enables farmers to keep track of their farming activities using a mobile phone. The farmers’ data combined with existing agricultural data is used to develop a comprehensive credit profile, to be used for the farmers’ credit assessment by financial institutions when they need funding.
In addition, Farm Drive also uses the records to understand each farmer’s specific needs and provide tailored information via SMS. This enables farmers to gain valuable insight into their farming operations, and maximize potential of their farms.
In 2016 Peris was given a Queen’s Young Leaders Award for her work to bridge the funding gap between farmers and financial institutions.
Peris receives an award from the Queen in 2016
The company’s goal is to build meaningful technology platforms and digital financial services to drive capital where it’s needed most.
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