Dario Raffaele

Across Sub-Saharan Africa, smallholder farmers feed the continent — yet most remain invisible to the financial system. Too small for banks, too risky without collateral, too dispersed to reach: they are locked out of the credit that could transform their livelihoods. In this talk, Dario shares how Emata is rewriting that story. By embedding lending directly into the agricultural cooperatives and value chains farmers already belong to, Emata turns internal and external data — milk deliveries, satellite data, loan allocation and repayment patterns — into a foundation for trust and fair financing. Leveraging advanced analytical methods and machine learning, Emata extracts the signals that feed its innovative, AI-powered credit scoring engine. This delivers lending decisions at a scale and accuracy traditional underwriting could never reach. Dario walks through the scale of the challenge, the algorithmic thinking that cracks it, and the modern data platform engineered to deliver it — offering a blueprint for how data and AI can drive genuine, lasting financial inclusion across emerging markets.