Dear SunCulture Supporters,

This letter is about data—what it tells us, what we’ve done with it, and where it points next. It’s about how we use data to guide product and investment decisions at SunCulture, how that data can help other companies grow smartly across Africa, and what it’s revealing about the future of the continent’s emerging consumer economy. It ends with a few thoughts on how to invest in Africa from someone building inside it every day.

SunCulture now has over 60,000 farmers in our network, mostly in Kenya, Uganda, Ivory Coast, and Togo. We’ve doubled in size in the last two years, and we’ll double again in the next two.

Our lending collection rate on our fintech platform is consistently above 90%. The African off-grid solar industry has an average collection rate of 68.5%.

What’s more, 90% of our customers interact with us digitally every month. Most of them are farmers who weren’t in the formal economy a few years ago. We know who they are, where they are, what they want, and how they manage their businesses. This real-time connection to the pulse of rural Africa is a competitive advantage that allows us to act on trends for this emerging consumer market before anyone else.

For example, in last year’s annual letter, I mentioned that many of our customers were asking us for additional products and services. I called this the start of an “irrigation-enabled marketplace,” a key part of what I described as the SunCulture ecosystem flywheel. That trend proved to be real—it wasn’t just a few isolated requests, but the start of a broader shift in what farmers expect from us.

So to act on this, we acquired a large minority stake in iPOS, a company helping agriculture micro-retailers to digitally manage inventory and payments. We did this because our customer data showed rising interest in agricultural inputs like seeds, and we knew we could use our existing credit history to make loans for these products. SunCulture customers can now get financing for high-quality agricultural inputs through us.

Another trend we noticed is that our customers were consistently reporting unexpected medical expenses as a top reason for falling behind in payments. So we partnered with an insurance company called Turaco and created SunCulture Protect, an insurance product that offers reliable and affordable insurance to customers purchasing SunCulture products on a Pay-As-You-Grow (or financing) basis. This coverage includes both life and health insurance, providing essential financial protection to customers and their families. By safeguarding smallholder farmers in Kenya from unexpected hardships, SunCulture Protect reinforces our commitment to improving the well-being and resilience of our community.

We’re investing to become the go-to access point for smallholder farmers, a one-stop-shop for historically fragmented information and services. For farmers, we provide an alternative to a value chain dominated by low-tech that is slow, unreliable, and inefficient. For vendors, we provide bankable customers with a credit history and market-leading repayment rates.

It’s easier to sell value-added products and services to farmers when they’re earning significantly more money because of reliable irrigation, have a credit history with us, and trust us.