By Desmond Koney, CEO, Complete Farmer
Across Africa, agriculture remains both the continent’s most important economic sector and one of its most underfinanced. It employs over half of the continent’s total workforce and represents approximately 17% of Africa’s GDP, yet it continues to struggle to attract the scale and type of capital required to modernise and expand. Indeed, according to the World Bank, only 1% of bank lending goes to the agricultural sector in Africa.
The result is a persistent financing gap that limits productivity, constrains farmer incomes, and reduces resilience in the face of climate and market shocks. At the heart of this challenge is not a lack of global capital. Financial institutions and private investors alike often hesitate to deploy funds into African agriculture because of one fundamental constraint: insufficient, fragmented, or unreliable data.
Without reliable data on key metrics such as farm performance, production cycles, input usage, yields, or repayment behaviour, lending to smallholder or mid-sized farms becomes an exercise in guessing rather than evidence-based investment.
In that context, it is not surprising that many banks default to collateral-heavy lending models that exclude the majority of farmers, or that private investors remain cautious about direct exposure to agricultural production. The financing gap in this sector is staggering: in 2024, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) estimated that SMEs across Africa faced a $117 billion financing shortfall.
But this challenge is precisely where technology can fundamentally reshape the equation. At Complete Farmer, we have spent years building infrastructure to address this structural information gap. Through our CF Grower platform, we are working to transform agriculture from a largely informal, opaque system into a data-rich, transparent, and investable asset class.
Building Trust Through Data
The core problem in agricultural finance is not just access to capital but access to credible information. Many farming operations, particularly small and medium-scale ones, lack formal records that banks require for underwriting. This creates a cycle where the absence of data leads to lack of financing, and lack of financing prevents the generation of better data.
This is a common problem across Africa’s informal economy: the World Bank has noted that “since MSMEs lack access to traditional credit facilities through banks and other traditional lenders, there is a shortage of credit data on MSME borrowers, also referred to as ‘thin file’ borrowers.”
However, digital agriculture platforms can break this cycle. By capturing structured, real-time data across the agricultural value chain — from input distribution and planting decisions to field monitoring, agronomic support, and harvest outcomes — technology platforms like CF Grower create a verifiable performance history for each farm. This transforms agriculture into a sector where risk can be measured, priced, and managed more effectively.
For lenders, this shift is profound. With the ability to evaluate farm-level performance data, they can improve credit underwriting, reduce default uncertainty, and ultimately lower the cost of capital for farmers.
Unlocking Private Capital
Much of the discussion around agricultural finance in Africa focuses on institutional actors, such as development finance institutions, multilateral banks, and government-backed programmes. While these remain essential, they cannot alone meet the scale of demand.
There is a vast pool of private capital that remains underutilised in agriculture, including from groups such as impact investors, family offices, diaspora investors, and even retail investors. The challenge is that agriculture, as traditionally structured, does not present itself as an easily investable or transparent asset class.
Technology changes this. By introducing traceability and standardised data structures, platforms like CF Grower allow agricultural production to be “packaged” in a way that investors can understand and evaluate. When investors can see what is being grown, where it is being grown, how it is being managed, and what outcomes are being achieved, they are in a much stronger position to make informed investment decisions.
This is also the thinking behind our work with the International Finance Corporation through the Africa Agriculture Accelerator Program. By combining digital infrastructure, farmer data, and market access, we are helping create the conditions for agricultural businesses to become more investment-ready, giving financial institutions and private investors greater confidence to deploy capital into the sector.
In this sense, data can act as a vital bridge between private capital and African farmers. Indeed, one of the most important shifts technology enables is conceptual: farmers are no longer just producers of crops, but producers of data. Every interaction with a digital agricultural system generates information that can be used to refine risk models, improve forecasting, and enhance financing decisions.
The Multiplier Effect
The implications of closing the agricultural financing gap extend far beyond individual farmers. Increased access to capital leads to higher productivity, more stable supply chains, and improved food security. It also strengthens rural economies, creates employment, and reduces vulnerability to external shocks such as climate variability and global price fluctuations.
The World Bank has argued that “agricultural development is an especially pro-poor source of economic growth — about two to four times more effective in raising incomes among the poorest than growth in other sectors.”
However, these outcomes depend on one critical enabler: the ability of capital to flow efficiently into the sector. Without reliable data infrastructure, that flow remains constrained.
Unlocking Capital
Ultimately, unlocking more capital for African agriculture requires more than better lending decisions but, more profoundly, a financing model built around how farming actually works. At Complete Farmer, we integrate financing throughout the entire production cycle by working with financing, insurance, and input partners to fund the farmers we support.
Complete Farmer also coordinates the procurement and distribution of inputs, provides continuous agronomic support during production, aggregates harvests through structured off-take, and facilitates repayment based on crop sales. This integrated approach helps manage credit, operational, production, and data risks, giving both farmers and capital providers greater confidence. The result? As agricultural practices become more transparent, measurable, and structured, it becomes not only easier to finance but also increasingly attractive as a scalable investment opportunity for Africa’s future.
Digital platforms like CF Grower demonstrate that it is possible to build an agricultural ecosystem where data is continuous, transparent, and actionable. In doing so, they lay the foundation for a new kind of agricultural finance: one that is inclusive, scalable, and attractive not just to institutions, but to private investors seeking meaningful, real-world impact.
