Startups for Sustainable Development

“We have a double impact - financial inclusion for customers who never had access to a safety net or credit, and climate resilience for those farmers facing adverse weather events. ”

OKO is a crop insurance company that works to assure the income of the farmers who feed the world. We caught up with CEO Simon Schwall to learn more about their mission, and why they believe they can provide lasting financial security to smallholder farmers.

The vast majority of farmers today are fully reliant on weather for income. A weather event can mean total income loss, bringing farmers to extremes to make ends meet, like selling what little they own, or taking their kids out of school.

OKO brings affordable crop insurance to underserved smallholder farmers, giving them access to the finance that keeps them sustainable and allows them to grow. Our mission is to secure the income for those who feed the world by being the main pan-African crop insurance provider.

I’ve always been passionate about technology that helps humanity. I witnessed the “mobile money” revolution in Africa while working as a management consultant in the telecom industry, and saw how isolated people were given a way to transact with the rest of the world. I knew I wanted to be a part of something like that.

During my time in Papua New Guinea, Senegal, and Egypt at a mobile micro-insurance startup, I saw a powerful need that wasn’t being served: securing income for farmers. In 2015, draughts were severely impacting them, leaving them unable to pay for insurance premiums, or even for basic necessities - villages were literally going hungry. Seeing this happening to vulnerable populations was so frustrating to me, and I decided to use my experience to solve this problem.

There’s a number of challenges that have kept insurance for smallholder farmers from being widely available.

Awareness: Insurance is not a well understood or tangible concept for people who haven’t experienced it. The farmers we talk to think about access to financing - how do I buy more seeds, fertilizers, and so on. They often get loans with extreme terms (even 40% for 6 months!), leading to terrible debt and even suicide. We talk to them in those terms, the value they get from insurance and in turn the loans they can qualify for once insured.

Distribution: How do you reach remote farmers, and in their local language? We set up last mile distribution by leveraging the reach of mobile operators, and empowering farmers to pay via their existing mobile wallets. We overcome language and literacy barriers by setting up call centers and sending voice notes in local languages, and sending field teams that go village to village.

Cost of scale: We have to drive down the price of premiums to make insurance accessible. Our key enabler has been earth observation data - instead of physically sending someone to verify a weather event, we automate verification at scale by looking at weather indexes and auto-triggering claim compensation. That lowered marginal cost means we can reach many more farmers.

We focus on three SDGs - 1 (No poverty), 8 (Decent work and economic growth), and 13 (Climate action). We have a double impact - financial inclusion for customers who never had access to a safety net or credit, and climate resilience for those farmers facing adverse weather events. We’ve been able to reach 18,500 farmers in Mali in the last 3 years, and 1000 in Uganda this year. For 97% of those farmers, this was their first experience with an insurance product!

We’re proud to partner with the UN Capital Development Fund and UN Women organizations. With their support we launched a new product for peanut-growers (as they are mostly female), and created a team of female-only sales agents to make them more comfortable with their insurance purchase. This increased our female farmer coverage from 18% to 25% in only 6 months.

So far 3000 farmers have received a payout, and we are reinvigorated by the testimonials of the difference that money has made in their ability to provide for their families and grow their farms.

We are at a stage where we need specialized knowledge - from distribution via mobile in developing countries, to AI for change detection on satellite imagery, to script optimization for operation in slow-connectivity markets. Only a company like Google, and the mentorship we received as part of the program, can provide us with that kind of support.

Our affiliation with Google has been beneficial when it comes to partnerships as well. It helped us get into the UN Development Programme’s catalog of impact solutions, and facilitated the connections with UN Women and UNCDF that led to our female-focused efforts in Mali. We’ve also been able to speak with influential ministries, ambassadors, and the media to raise awareness and advance our mission. 

We’re excited to have just launched in Ivory Coast, and have ambitious goals to reach 1 million insured farmers across 6-7 countries by 2026, to become the leading pan-African crop insurance company. For that we’ll focus on reaching operational profitability in Mali this year, and be at 50,000 farmers by next season.

We’re also working with a major agricultural industry player to develop pest and disease detection technology that will help us address more adverse events in addition to weather. The fastest way to grow is by partnering with agricultural industries, helping them to reach their financial goals by supporting their farmers. By helping farmers, we’re helping the world they feed, so that’s the end goal of everything we do.

Thank you Simon and OKO for sharing with us their compelling story of impact and their experiences participating in the Startups for Sustainable Development program.

Learn more about OKO

Apply to participate in Startups for Sustainable Development

“Our affiliation with Google helped us get into the UN Development Programme’s catalog of impact solutions, and facilitated the connections with UN Women and UNCDF that led to our female-focused efforts in Mali.”