FMO partners with Maha Agriculture Microfinance & Harvesting Inc to make lending to farmers more efficient in Myanmar

FMO announced its partnership with Myanmar-based Maha Agriculture Microfinance (“Maha”) and U.S.-based Harvesting Inc (“Harvesting”) to provide a grant that would help make lending to Myanmar farmers more efficient.

As part of its capacity development program, FMO will financially support the pilot deployment of Agriculture Intelligence Engine, a digital agri-lending suite built by Harvesting. The product leverages on machine learning and alternative datasets such as multi-spectral imagery to build credit scores for farmers and provides digital tools for financial institutions to effectivity make and manage loans to farmers.

Harvesting has built an end-to-end offering to help agriculture lenders to manage and scale their lending operations. From being able to collect loan applications on ground using a mobile application, to building credit risk scores using alternative datasets, to providing a loan approval dashboard. Its product also provides a unique dashboard for lenders to monitor their loan portfolio, which captures various risks on the farm productivity and hence loan recovery.

Thadoe Hein, Chairman and Group CEO of Awba said, “We look to creating significant change in Myanmar’s agriculture industry by acquiring an in-depth understanding of the needs of our farmers. We recognize that farmers have limited access to competitive agricultural loans, and high interest rates inhibit profitability. This led us to set up Maha Agriculture Microfinance to provide farmers with much-needed capital for them to invest in their farming businesses.”

Ruchit Garg, Founder and CEO, Harvesting said, “By building non-linear, machine learning based alternatives to traditional risk models, the partnership can increase the accuracy of credit risk appraisals to agricultural borrowers, reduce human biases and reduce the transaction costs associated with loan approval. We have a unique opportunity to prove something to the market through this partnership that will showcase to the micro-finance and banking industry in Myanmar the power of financial inclusion coupled with a digital FinTech approach using alternative data analytics for solving smallholder farmers pain points.”

Original source: FMO
Published on 3 October 2018