Zowasel: How to turn Agricultural Data into Financial Access

Zowasel is redefining how agricultural finance works in Nigeria by solving one of the sector’s most persistent barriers: the absence of reliable, interoperable data that lenders can trust. Although agriculture powers 22% of Nigeria’s economy, it receives less than 4% of total bank lending—one of the widest credit gaps in Africa. Traditional lenders struggle not only with risk perception but also with fragmented, unverifiable farm-level information scattered across government registries, agritech platforms, and national ID systems.

Zowasel places itself at the centre of this challenge. Since its launch, the company has built one of Nigeria’s largest structured repositories of farmer and production data, enabling financial institutions to make data-driven decisions with unprecedented clarity. 

From Marketplace to Data Infrastructure Company

Zowasel was founded in 2014 in Nigeria with a clear mission: to solve the two most entrenched challenges holding back smallholder farmers—access to markets and access to finance. Over five years of field research across regions and value chains, the company confirmed these as the core structural bottlenecks, arguing that if they were solved, “all other problems across the value chain” would be significantly reduced.

On the market side, Zowasel built a digital marketplace that directly connected smallholders and cooperatives to credible off-takers, eliminating layers of intermediaries that traditionally depressed farmer earnings. By standardising crop quality assessments, digitising offers, and enabling transparent price discovery, the platform created a fairer, more efficient trading environment for both farmers and buyers. 

On the financial side, Zowasel initially tested a crowdfunding model to help farmers raise working capital. The idea showed promise but struggled with high operational costs, unrealistic interest demands from retail contributors, and a broader market that was not yet mature. These lessons were pivotal. The company moved away from retail fundraising to a data-led, infrastructure model, focusing on partnerships with formal financial institutions and digitised value chains. 

Leveraging intelligence data from its marketplace model, the company quickly realised that transaction-level data points—such as verified deliveries, quality tests, and payment records—could serve as behavioural collateral, transforming how lenders assess agricultural borrowers. 

This marked Zowasel’s evolution to leverage data so it could solve the challenge of lack of collateral that many smallholders farmers face.  The data provided by Zowasel gives financial institutions the insight they need to lend confidently across agricultural value chains.  

ACESS: The Intelligence Engine Powering Agricultural Lending

Zowasel’s insights culminated in the creation of ACESS (Alternative Credit Evaluation Scoring System)—an AI-driven credit assessment framework that converts farmers’ production, delivery, and transaction histories into finance-ready intelligence

Developed through co-funding from Zowasel (60%) and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) (40%), with technical support from Nigeria’s federal government, ACESS integrates soil profiles, weather patterns, price trends, production behaviour, and transaction history to determine creditworthiness. Crucially, it enables lending without physical collateral, opening the door for financial institutions to serve smallholders previously excluded from the formal credit system.

ACESS uses an AI-based Predictive Dynamic System (PDS) to generate a score from A to F for each farmer (with A being the highest). This feeds into the Alternative Credit Assessment Report (ACAR)—a digital profile that lenders can ingest directly into their underwriting systems. Beyond the score itself, the ACAR embeds Zowasel’s full verification workflow, ensuring that every data point used for lending decisions is authentic. This process begins with data triangulation carried out by Zowasel’s field agents, who collect information from farmers at different points in the season to confirm consistency. These observations are then validated through community-level endorsements, wherein local leaders, cooperative heads, or cluster supervisors attest to the farmer’s credibility and performance within the group. 

In addition to its predictive strength, ACESS is designed to integrate seamlessly with the operational realities of banks and financial institutions. The platform allows lenders to customize risk variables, adjust weightings, or import their own parameters—ensuring that the scoring logic aligns with their internal risk frameworks. This seamless integration ensures banks gain not just clean, verified farmer data, but a plug-and-play credit infrastructure that unlocks new lending segments, reduces underwriting friction, and scales agricultural portfolios with confidence. 

Strengthening Nigeria’s Financial System Through Better Data

It is crucial to note, Zowasel’s infrastructure is not operating in isolation. It’s roll-out has been helped by the National Identification Number (NIN), issued by the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), provides every registered Nigerian with a unique, verifiable identity. Zowasel leverages this for verification of farmers. Similarly, the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security (FMAFS) is constructing digital farmer registries that geo-locate farms and record production data—creating a national asset that Zowasel’s platform taps into and enriches with its marketplace and transaction data. Further, the Nigerian Incentive‑Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL) provides credit risk guarantees and monitors agribusiness portfolios—Zowasel integrates these guarantees into its lending framework and uses NIRSAL’s risk-sharing mechanisms as part of its value proposition. At the same time Zowasel is helping the Nigerian government to implement it’s policy to strengthen the agricultural sector.

Together, these connections position Zowasel as the private-sector backbone that ensures that national digitization policies actually result in farmer’s access to credit. Government systems create the enabling public infrastructure—identity, registries, and guarantees—while Zowasel provides the applied technology layer that generates the relevant data and credit scores and links it to the systems of banks and off-takers.

Instilling trust in the system:

The backbone of Zowasel’s data governance is trust. Its framework places farmers at the center, recognizing them as the rightful owners of their data. Every farmer signs a digital consent agreement that clearly outlines what information can be shared, with whom, and for what purpose. As Jerry Oche explains, “Trust is the infrastructure we build first.”

According to the CEO, “Our biggest challenge is data accuracy. Farmers don’t always give correct information — not out of malice, but due to literacy issues or misunderstanding.” He said Zowasel now “verifies every data point three times — collection, validation, and revalidation — before a farmer becomes finance-eligible. When the verification is done by someone in the community, farmers are more open and truthful.”

He elaborated that Zowasel employs in-field verifiers who work directly with cooperatives to collect and validate information such as farm size, location, and production. “We hire local people as verifiers, but we also train the cooperatives to train their own — so it becomes cheaper and more sustainable.” 

ACESS is built with robust safeguards, including encrypted cloud storage, regular external cybersecurity audits, and full compliance with the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation (NDPR). Notably, its development was supported by the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), underscoring its alignment with national standards.

Zowasel practices strict data minimization, sharing only what is necessary. With FIs, it provides KYC details, loan requests, and farm-level data essential for underwriting. Commodity buyers, on the other hand, receive only traceability-level information—such as crop type, location, and sustainability metrics.

As Oche further notes, “We have Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA) with every data partner, and all access is logged. Our architecture is built on traceability—who accessed what, when, and for what purpose.”

Internally, Zowasel enforces role-based access controls, ensuring that sensitive data is only available to authorized personnel by department and function.

Conclusion:

Zowasel’s journey—from a commodity marketplace to a data-driven credit enabler—reflects a broader shift in Nigeria’s agricultural finance landscape. By translating fragmented farmer activity into structured, finance-ready intelligence, Zowasel is leveraging data to dismantle the barriers that have long kept smallholders on the margins of formal finance.

ACESS proves that when technology is built with empathy, trust, and local context, it can unlock capital at scale. With its layered approach—combining AI, community validation, risk guarantees, and data protection—Zowasel offers a blueprint for inclusive finance that is both scalable and sustainable. Building on its success in Nigeria, Zowasel has begun expanding to new markets such as Tanzania, where it adapts its Nigerian-tested standards while navigating and negotiating locally relevant compliance requirements.

As Nigeria continues to invest in digital infrastructure and financial reforms, innovations like Zowasel will be critical in ensuring that agriculture is not just a contributor to GDP, but a driver of equitable growth. The future lies in smarter systems that understand the farmer—and Zowasel is leading the way.