About
SatSure Sparta is an open innovation data platform that enables the combination of satellite imagery with weather, IoT, social and economic datasets, among others, to generate timely, location-specific and actionable insights that can be used by agritech companies, agrifood corporates and financial services firms.
Capability and features
Agribusinesses can use SatSure Sparta to access satellite data products as APIs to build and scale agricultural advisory and farm management solutions. By using SatSure Sparta, clients do not need to invest in building remote sensing teams and can scale their businesses faster by easily integrating spatial intelligence into their operations and offering satellite-derived predictive insights as a value-add to their customers.
Input manufacturers can use SatSure Sparta for crop health monitoring, crop yield data and to build historical crop databases for analysis of cropping and climate patterns. This can enable better business planning and supply chain efficiency.
Financial institutions can also use SatSure Sparta’s historical crop data at the farm and village level to assess farm-level risk and regional economic development.
Progress to date
In India, banks have provided loans to almost two million farmers using SatSure’s platform. About 500,000 farmer insurance claims have been settled using information from the platform. SatSure has also provided advisory services to more than 100,000 farmers through their clients.
In the Philippines, SatSure, in partnership with the Philippines Department of Agriculture and a crop insurance company, has worked with about 90,000 farmers to provide improved yield assessments, post-typhoon damage assessments and targeted extension services. SatSure is also reaching about 15,000 farmers in Myanmar through their partnership with Maha Microfinance.
SatSure partners with Microsoft in India and Amazon Web Services in the APAC region as well as about 71 agritech firms in India. In 2019, SatSure was a finalist in MIT’s Inclusive Innovation Challenge, selected as one of the top innovators by the World Bank in their Agriculture InsureTech Innovation challenge and awarded an ADB Ventures award. SatSure is also a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Innovators Community.
About
Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture (SFSA) under its Agricultural Insurance Solutions (AIS) division, offers weather based insurance, to helps growers protect their investment in quality inputs, repay loans even if bad weather damages their crops, and replant at once when germination fails because of irregular rains after planting. SFSA uses state-of-the-art climate and crop models, efficient processing of claims by insurers, and a record of timely pay-outs to underpin a reputation for lean parametric solutions that do not require loss adjustment in the field.
Weather insurance enables farmers to invest, and for this and other reasons is also of interest to governments, donors, international organizations, NGOs working in agriculture, and the agribusiness sector, i.e., input and service companies, commodity off-takers, and financial institutions offering value chain financing and loans to farmers.
Capability and features
Agricultural input companies put a registration card with a unique code in each bag of seed or fertilizer. When a farmers opens the bag at the time of planting, they find the card and follows its instructions on sending an SMS for registration. From this SMS, SFSA knows the farmer’s location and can monitor the rainfall using satellites. The premiums are paid by the input company; while payouts to the farmers are done via mobile money transfer.
SFSA offers smallholders in Asia and Africa a viable tech-based solution using automated weather stations and satellite imagery to monitor crop losses through weather indices developed. The solution solves both the affordability and distribution challenges (through eWallet) that agricultural insurance faces in reaching smallholders. Basic Financial Literacy training are also taken up as a part of the capacity building section of the program.
Progress to date
SFSA has worked with over 2,000,000 farmers across Africa and Asia.Their insurance programs in Bangladesh are set to impact at least 230,000 smallholders by 2021.
SFSA is working to improve the livelihood of end users by creating an application called the Resilience Engine. It is an IT Platform that automates agri-insurance business operation processes and will incorporate all activities including weather database management, pricing process, data collection, mobile phone integration, monitoring and evaluation. The application will also aide in the capacity building process by hosting high quality content for training purposes.
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