LitFin Intelligence is extending senior agricultural and credit judgement to everyone in the chain, from the farmer to the lender, and connecting the de-risking tools Tanzania has already built.
AI-generated. Not financial advice. A person always makes the decision.
Why agricultural finance is hard
Telling whether a field will produce, and whether a season can carry a loan, takes decades on the ground and in the credit room. Few people hold that judgement, and none can be everywhere. The tools meant to reduce the risk of lending to agriculture were built one at a time, and nothing joins them.
Close to three decades in banking and four decades in agricultural production stand behind his judgement. Mwikila, LitFin Intelligence's AI Senior Agriculture & Finance Consultant, carries both.
No one party sees the whole chain a smallholder is financed through. The aim is for every party to see it, with evidence behind each part. Only the lender is served today; service for the other four is being built.
For the farmer, and for the person who wants to become one: advice in their own language, and a group a lender can finance.
A written view of what their cover stands behind.
The commitment to buy, which is often what a value chain loan rests on.
Advises farmers and verifies the plot, the inputs and the deliveries.
Appraisal, underwriting and risk analysis on agricultural credit files.
Where we are
We are an early-stage company in Dar es Salaam, with no customer logos to show yet and no figure we cannot source.
It answers the questions a file raises from the evidence in it, and writes the appraisal a credit committee can question line by line.
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 judgement is built on practice files first.
A lender writes modules on its own policy and products, held to the same standard as the core curriculum, so its own way of lending becomes something it can teach.
Done on the same file as the appraisal: whether the season can carry the loan, and what the file puts at risk.
A page it could not read is listed as unread, and nothing is filled in for it.
The file is worked, and the appraisal written, in the language the officer chooses, one language at a time.
Tested on agricultural files with officers from a major agricultural lender that plays a large de-risking role for agricultural loans in Tanzania.
An individual loan, a group loan or a whole portfolio, each worked at its own level.
Being built, not live yet
The same judgement, extended to the group, the buyer, the cover, the people on the ground and the farmer.
Appraising a whole value chain as one case, so a lender sees every link a loan rests on.
Helping farmers form and run groups a lender can finance, with every member visible beneath the group.
Village-based agronomists confirm on the ground what a file says, with Mwikila beside them.
The same mind beside the farmer, the buyer, the insurer and the guarantor, each in their own language and on their own terms. Everyone on a chain sees the whole chain for as long as it runs: who is in it, what each has committed to, what has been checked and what each status rests on. A person's private details are open from the start only to the parties whose job is to assess them, such as the lender, under signed data and privacy agreements. For everyone else they stay closed unless that person opens them.
Following a financed season as it runs, so a problem is seen while there is still time to act.
Guarantee schemes, value chain and group lending, warehouse receipts and savings groups already exist in Tanzania. This is the layer that lets them be used together.
A plan, not a service. The roadmap below gives the order.
Depth in one country first, then breadth across the region.
Tanzania only, and only the lender's side of the chain.
Value chain and group finance appraised as one case.
The same service taken to the other East African countries one at a time, fitted to each country's rules and farming.
A smallholder farmer financed on the evidence of her whole chain, in every East African country.
Lenders, guarantors, insurers, buyers, farmer groups and partners: write to us here.
hello@litfin-training.com