Tool for

Agricultural

Risk

Advice

The TARA tool is a dashboard that shows wetness conditions, climate risk scores and advisories per region. Although the tool is currently still under construction, a demonstration of the tool can be requested (see the contact form below). The climate risk scores have been developed and the impact on non-payment has been investigated for +400 farmers in Kenya. The first results show that the TARA climate risk scores have considerable predictive value (0.23-0.49 Information value scores) on classifying non-payment behavior. A crop selector is also developed, which is a tool that uses soil moisture risk information to highlight which crops are able to grow well per region. In a next phase, the climate risk scores will be tested on a bigger scale and fine-tuned further. Furthermore, phase 2 aims on connecting TARA to existing credit scoring and financial data platform(s) by API and in translating the climate risk information into more agricultural advisories (f.e. weather alerts, efficient use of water and pesticides and climate change risk management).

TARA is fed by high resolution data that tells for the last 17 years exactly what happened with the water inside the soil that is key for crop growth. By studying a specific part of the energy spectrum, passive microwaves, we can see through clouds and thus always have data. These data are available for any place on Earth and are validated extensively. Therefore, TARA has extremely high scalability.

TARA reduces the basis risk and monitoring costs of financial products. It connects unique production hazard information with loan repayment data for risk assessment and agricultural advice and will lead to more financially included smallholders.

Key targets of TARA

• Lowered default rates for agriculture loans due to improved scoring method (this is currently being studied in the lending test case)
• Recovery costs reduced (when default rates are lowered)
• Improved staff productivity due to shortened loan appraisal processes
• Portfolio de-risking enabling increased lending
• Improved brand loyalty in the long term for increasing financial inclusion of smallholders

TARA is currently open for engaging with new partners that would like to test the TARA tool in their current business or projects. Also TARA is still searching for ~500k of funding to get TARA as multi-user platform to the operational level serving FSPs, banks, (re)insurers, farmer organisations and NGOs.

Key targets of TARA

• Lowered default rates for agriculture loans due to improved scoring method (this is currently being studied in the lending test case)
• Recovery costs reduced (when default rates are lowered)
• Improved staff productivity due to shortened loan appraisal processes
• Portfolio de-risking enabling increased lending
• Improved brand loyalty in the long term for increasing financial inclusion of smallholders

TARA is a risk-assessment platform tailored for financial institutions (FIs) to provide them with improved risk information for credit scoring and insurance index products to smallholders. The tool is currently being developed and will be integrated with financial data (i.e. loan history and psychometric data), that enables FIs to include the effects of climate variability as well as the paying capacity of an individual smallholder in their credit scoring systems.

The TARA platform can be accessed through the "ACCESS RISK SCORES"-button on the TARA website.

This platform is made by the Dutch satellite data company VanderSat, in collaboration with the partners ACRE Africa and Tulaa.

The first version is tailored for Kenya. We are working on an extended worldwide version.

The first version contains a multi-crop version and one that is tailored for potato. Based on the demand, a second version will include other crops as well.

You pay per API request through the "ACCESS RISK SCORES"-button on the TARA website. This will bring you to a separate interface in which you specify your API request and are automatically forwarded to the payment environment.