Facilitating Agricultural Sustainability and Financing Possibilities to Local Farmers in Nigeria With Credit Scoring

This is a paid opportunity. In order to be eligible to apply for this project, you need to be part of the Omdena community and have finished at least one AI Innovation Challenge.

You can find our upcoming AI Innovation Challenges at https://omdena.com/projects.

The problem

Agriculture is a crucial sector in Nigeria’s economy, contributing significantly to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and employing over 70% of the population. Despite the sector’s importance, local farmers in Nigeria face several challenges that impede their productivity and ability to access finance. These challenges include inadequate infrastructure, poor access to markets, limited access to credit, and insufficient technical and financial resources. One of the major problems faced by local farmers is the lack of access to finance, which limits their ability to purchase quality inputs, equipment, and technology needed for sustainable farming. Most local farmers in Nigeria operate on a small scale and often lack the collateral needed to secure loans from financial institutions. Even when they can secure loans, high-interest rates, and unfavorable repayment terms often make it difficult for farmers to repay the loans.

This project aims to address these challenges by using credit scoring to assess the creditworthiness of local farmers in Nigeria. In addition to facilitating access to finance, the project also aims to promote agricultural sustainability by providing farmers with the resources and knowledge needed to adopt sustainable farming practices.

Overall, this project seeks to promote agricultural sustainability and facilitate financing possibilities for local farmers in Nigeria by developing a credit scoring system that evaluates the creditworthiness of farmers and provides them with access to affordable financing. This approach is expected to improve farmers’ productivity, reduce poverty, and promote economic growth in Nigeria’s agricultural sector.

The project goals

The primary goal of this project is to build a holistic credit scoring system for farmers considering the 5Cs of credit and data about agriculture related to farmer behavior.

Project goals:

• Data collection, processing, and EDA
• Perform the necessary feature engineering and recognize the importance of each feature and contribution to the model accuracy
• Build a credit scoring model that considers multiple relevant factors
• Build a crop yield prediction model and connect the outcome of this model to the credit scoring model
• Integrate the API endpoints with Zowasel’s current application
• Export the outcomes and predictions from the previous steps into a detailed report

**More details will be shared once the project is joined.

Why join? The uniqueness of Omdena Top Talent Projects

Top Talent opportunities come as a natural next step after participating in Omdena’s AI Innovation Challenges.

Everyone in the community is eligible to participate once they have shown the relevant skills based on the merit of involvement in past Omdena challenges and the community.

If you are looking for the next challenge after participating in one or more Omdena AI Innovation Challenges, then we believe you have made the right choice! With a healthy, pressured environment, you will be pushed to contribute, learn and grow even more.