Improving Farmer Selection for the Babban Gona Agricultural Franchise in Nigeria

This workshop project involved identification of farmer selection criteria and development of a risk assessment tool for farmer selection, for Babban Gona (BG) – a social enterprise serving smallholder farmers in Nigeria. The workshop team relied on the current state assessment of BG’s selection model and secondary research on global best practices in agricultural lending and risk modelling. The team developed a survey comprising additional farmer selection criteria to gauge farmers’ performance and collaboration potential. The responses to the survey would be utilized by the random forest-based risk assessment tool developed by the team to predict outcomes for the respective harvest season. The tools are intended to be used as decision-aides, require iterative updates over subsequent years and are expected to improve in accuracy with progressively larger data-sets.