Smallholder farmers across Africa have long struggled to access formal credit, largely because agricultural livelihoods are highly exposed to climate and production risks. Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa is predominantly rain-fed—accounting for nearly 95% of cultivated land—making farmers acutely vulnerable to droughts, floods, and erratic rainfall. Estimates suggest that climate-related shocks already cost African agriculture 2 to 3% of its GDP annually. A single drought, flood, or pest outbreak can wipe out an entire harvest. In the absence of insurance, farmers are left with little buffer to absorb losses and reduced ability to repay loans. For lenders, this lack of risk protection translates into higher default risk, making agricultural lending unattractive even when demand for credit is strong.

Founded in 2015 by Rose Goslinga and Thomas Njeru, Pula addresses this challenge by using agricultural insurance as a catalyst for finance. Rather than selling insurance directly to farmers, Pula partners with insurers and reinsurers to embed insurance into agricultural credit and input financing. By absorbing climate-related shocks, this insurance layer reduces the risk of loan default when extreme weather events occur, making agricultural lending more predictable and manageable.

But today, the company is going much further. Its core mission has evolved into building the data infrastructure that makes more farmers understandable, traceable, and ultimately bankable. Pula is unlocking access to credit not by pushing insurance alone, but by also sharing verified farmer data with other entities—banks, fintechs, cooperatives, government systems, and traceability providers. This data becomes the backbone of new credit models designed for smallholders.

From Insurance Provider to Financial Infrastructure Builder

Pula began with a simple idea: use data to help insurance companies design actuarially sound crop insurance that protects farmers from climate shocks. But as the company expanded across Africa, one insight became clear: the biggest barrier for farmers is not insurance—it is access to finance.

As Pula’s Vice President (Data Services), Nabil Janmohamed, puts it: “Insurance is a by-product. The real problem we are solving is access to finance.”

While embedded insurance helped reduce lenders’ exposure to climate shocks, it also revealed a deeper limitation. Risk protection could stabilize repayments after a shock, but it did not, on its own, make farmers visible to the formal financial system. Lenders still needed reliable information on who farmers were, where they farmed, and how they participated in agricultural value chains. Without this visibility, credit decisions remained conservative, even in insured contexts.

A concrete inflection point came when Pula began supporting compliance with the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) in Uganda’s coffee sector. Under EUDR, exporters must demonstrate that coffee does not originate from deforested land, requiring precise farm geolocation and end-to-end traceability across the supply chain. To meet these requirements, Pula mapped approximately 1.7 million farmers capturing GPS polygons, farm boundaries, and detailed geospatial data.

Although collected for regulatory compliance, this process fundamentally altered how farmers could engage with formal finance. The same verified geospatial data that enabled traceability also reduced uncertainty for lenders—lowering due-diligence costs, strengthening borrower assessment, and making smallholder lending operationally viable at scale.

How Data Sharing Works

Uganda’s government pre-approves a set of licensed traceability providers that access Pula’s data through secure APIs, limited strictly to the minimum information required under data-minimisation rules.

As farmers trade coffee—often through multiple intermediaries—these traceability providers and platforms record essential transaction details such as the farmer’s identity, the quantity traded, the price, the time of the transaction, and the GPS-linked origin of the farm. Over time, this information builds a digital transaction history for each farmer, allowing them to develop an implicit credit profile without ever completing a formal loan application.

Farm mapping and data collection are continuous processes, underpinned by the assumption that farmers will eventually be able to self-map through Pula’s infrastructure. To support compliance with the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), third-party actors such as Meridia subsequently play a critical role in validating the quality and integrity of geospatial data. This independent verification strengthens the credibility and reliability of underlying farmer records.

Taken together, comprehensive and continuous data collection address a key information gap for lenders. Banks can gain visibility into how much a farmer sells, how frequently they trade, their cash inflows and outflows, the climate risks associated with a specific plot, and the expected yield potential. While Pula does not share farmer data directly with financial institutions, farmers can independently choose to share their data. This enables lenders to use these records as a proxy for KYC and risk assessment, laying the foundation for a new form of digital identity in agricultural finance.

Creditworthiness Through Data, Not Collateral

Traditionally, banks struggle with rural KYC because smallholder farmers lack collateral, credit histories, and formal business records, but Pula’s traceability-linked data fundamentally changes this dynamic by allowing a farmer’s actual trading behaviour to serve as their credit profile. In coffee, sales records, mapped farm plots, and EUDR-compliant traceability offer the proof of bankability. This data enables lending decisions based on verified production rather than paperwork, supports climate-smart credit using long-term rainfall and risk histories, allows better pricing for low-risk farmers, and makes insurance-blended finance viable in higher-risk regions. For lenders, this creates the ability to distinguish more clearly between lower- and higher-risk farmers, using verified data rather than broad assumptions about the sector.

Why Data Sharing Matters for Farmer Finance

Importantly, Pula does not monetise farmer data; instead, it uses responsible data sharing to build farmer credit histories through trade records, reduce lending risk using geospatial and climate insights, support compliant exports under EUDR requirements, and create strong incentives for banks to serve smallholders. As loan portfolios grow, premium volumes increase, allowing Pula to benefit indirectly from larger premiums. This, in turn, makes their agricultural portfolios more attractive to insurers and reinsurers while also improving diversification.

As, Nabil observes, traditional KYC forms fail to capture who farmers really are, but with robust farmer data, financial institutions can finally understand their customers.

As Nabil notes: “Traditional KYC forms fail to capture who farmers really are, but with robust farmer data, financial institutions can finally understand their customers”

Conclusion

Pula began as an agricultural insurer, but today it is building something much larger: the digital rails that make inclusive agricultural finance possible. By combining embedded insurance with verified and traceable farmer data, and sharing this information securely and with farmer consent, Pula is enabling banks, fintechs, and supply-chain actors to better understand and serve smallholder farmers. This approach is opening new pathways to credit, reducing risk across the financial system, and helping millions of farmers access finance from which they have long been excluded. In doing so, Pula is no longer just solving for insurance, but for visibility, trust, and bankability—reshaping how agricultural finance works across Africa.