Selection Uganda
Simbuka
Simbuka is here to simplify and automate lending processes to the core, enabling financial institutions of all sizes to succeed in today’s competitive environment.
The Simbuka Loan Management System is a SAAS cloud solution to onboard, screen, evaluate, reject or approve and monitor loan applications. It streamlines employee, end-customers and third-party interactions and leads to increased profitability, efficiency, transparency and regulatory compliance across a financial institution. Crop-specific cashflow projections (Agricultural Credit Assessment Tool; A-CAT) has been embedded into Simbuka’s Loan Management System. The A-CAT presents an accurate simulation of the business model of a farmer business by providing crop specific information on cost of inputs, processing and other crop specific data, resulting in a realistic payment plan. The projections help loan officers to better understand the seasonal needs of farmers as well as to better assess the risk of the loan.
The Problem
There is no doubt that agriculture is the economic powerhouse of the Ugandan economy. Subsistence farming currently dominates the sector in Uganda, yet, the sector has not tapped its potential to drive major economic growth and lift millions of people out of poverty.
Access to finance for smallholder farmers (SHFs) and farmer cooperatives is essential to grow businesses and make the required investments to professionalize. However, most of the banks have been extremely reluctant to engage in rural finance – and even more so in agricultural investment, therefore, increasing the gap between the supply and demand of agricultural finance.
Furthermore, many processes at financial institutions in Uganda are paper-based. Financial institutions struggle with uniform decision-making, scorecards and storing all-important loan documents in a digital archive. Paperless and streamlined operations are crucial to achieving further growth.
The Solution
Our solution focuses on making the lending procedures and processes data-driven and digitized. Both financial institutions and end customers will benefit – especially young women. Organizations will boost efficiency, eliminate waste, reduce cycle times, and cut costs. End customers will benefit from timely delivery, objective decision-making, faster customer response and potential reduction of the costs. Paperless processes will also have a positive environmental impact.
Our objective is to empower female youth subsistence farmers to become business farmers and ultimately reduce the gap between supply (Micro-Finance Institutions) and demand (farmers) of agricultural finance. Transforming these roles and delivering them at the doorstep of an MFI is what we consider a true last-mile delivery.
The 600 female youth that will join this program will:
- Receive €8,- mobile money every Monday morning for a period of 100 weeks
- Come together in weekly group meetings for training and peer-to-peer learning
Groups of 20 women will be supported to start VSLA savings groups together:
This enables women to save in a group so they can make bigger investments to grow their businesses. These 3 mutually reinforcing components of the program will enable the youth to overcome scarcity, invest in a better future, increase human capital and escape poverty.
This solution will be ‘sticky’ for MFIs as it will see the combined value of risk reduction and increased loan volume through process efficiency, and therefore will not let go once the initial subscription period has expired. This ‘stickiness’ is greatly enhanced by the availability of an in-country implementation team who can provide field monitoring services to ensure the success of the investment.
Additionality
With CFYE support, the project will be better designed, proceed more quickly, and reach more young people than it otherwise would have. Specifically, in the area of Decent Work, we will gain in-depth guidance on defining and measuring Decent Work when transforming from subsistence farming to business farming. With CFYE assistance, we can be guided in how the Living Income could be measured and calculated. As a result of the regular measurements, there is a possibility to add new questions if we or our donors request specific data.