First Access Among Winners of MasterCard Foundation Fund for Rural Prosperity Innovation Competition

Leveraging Data to Drive Rural Financial Access

In partnership with Esoko, First Access will develop Africa’s first-of-its-kind rural agricultural credit-scoring platform for lending institutions. The two institutions will pioneer the acquisition and coordination of disparate data sets, from weather data to farmer profiles and other agricultural input data, to deliver more thorough borrower credit profiles and drive financial accessibility for the rural consumer. With these data sets, the team will draw on its deep experience in establishing borrower credit profiles from thin files in informal markets. This will help institutions collect better information faster, leading to improved decision-making while dramatically reducing the cost of lending.