Satellite Data Unlocks Access to Finance for India’s Climate-Vulnerable Farmers
Agriculture accounts for 49 percent of India’s employment and feeds 1.3 billion people. Yet farmers in more than 75 percent of India’s districts face risks from extreme climate events1.
Improved access to finance would increase farmers’ resilience to climate-related crop damage and lost income. Yet India’s financial institutions struggle to work with the 78 percent of farmer households that are smallholders2 due to the difficulty and expense of assessing risk.
Bengaluru-based SatSure has developed a data analytics platform that unlocks finance for smallholder farms. SatSure aggregates real-time and historical data from satellites and operations. Proprietary AI-powered modelling gauges a farm’s income generation potential, allowing financial institutions to assess risk more accurately. The solution empowers financial institutions to issue credit and insurance policies faster, in higher volume, and more cost-effectively.
Since its inception in 2017, SatSure has partnered with India’s leading financial institutions and insurance companies including ICICI Bank, Reliance General Insurance, and Samunnati Finance. It has reduced agricultural loan appraisals from 15 days to just one.
ADB Ventures invested in SatSure in early 2022 to grow the company’s product portfolio and aid regional expansion. Satsure expects to support 2.5 million loans to smallholder farmers in the region by 2025, contributing to their climate resilience.
[1] Source: Council on Energy, Environment and Water
[2] Source: FAO
