Don’t get Watson Matsa started on farmers and banks, as we did. By the swimming pool at Somerset Westview Hotel in Nairobi, he talks about both with the conviction of a man who has spent enough time inside a bank to know why banks don’t understand farmers.
It is a Friday evening, July 26. Around us, Nairobi is warming up for the weekend. There is coffee on one table, tea on another, and every so often someone reaches into their pocket for a cigarette. Matsa, meanwhile, is talking about soil, rainfall, and credit scores.
The founder of eSusFarm Africa wasn’t always an agriculture man. He studied economics and accounting at Rhodes University in South Africa and later worked in credit analytics at FNB. Finance was supposed to be the thing. Then an idea he encountered at university got him thinking: information unlocks capital. His problem with that idea was Africa. What happens when the information needed to unlock capital simply isn’t there?
That question eventually led him to smallholder farmers and eSusFarm Africa.
Originally published by TechCabal.