Across rural India, women do much of the work that keeps smallholder farms running. Yet despite carrying a large share of agricultural labor alongside other income-generating work, women remain largely off the radar of the financial services sector, underserved by the very institutions that could help them grow their businesses.
Turning physical agricultural variables into digital records can provide much-needed data for decision-making and help bring these women smallholder farmers into the formal financial ecosystem by establishing a digital trail. To that end, Dvara E- Registry (DER), an India-based agri-fintech and a cohort member of the joint CGAP and IDH initiative, Accelerating Business to Empower Rural women in Agriculture (ABERA), is using satellite imagery and AI-powered analytics to digitize land records and monitor crop cycles, soil health, farm productivity, and climate impacts at the individual farm level. This data provides a comprehensive view in real-time on what is happening in the field at scale.
By generating reliable farm-level data, DER shows how technology can reduce the information barriers that often keep women farmers excluded from formal finance. Some 36% of the farmers DER works with are women, and 36% of DER’s lending is to women as primary borrowers.
Women at the frontlines of climate change, with few tools to prepare
Across rural India, farmers are contending with an intensifying climate threat that is steadily eroding household incomes. Women are most exposed. As the country’s primary agricultural laborers, they work the fields during extreme heat and spend additional time applying pesticides as shifting weather patterns introduce new pests. Yet they are the least served by the advisory and financial services that could help them adapt. Where agricultural advisory services exist at all, they rarely reach women farmers with the precision or timeliness needed for planting, fertilizing, or pest management decisions. Formal financial institutions, risk-averse by nature, have historically been reluctant to extend credit to smallholder farmers, especially women, who often lack formal land titles due to gendered social norms, limited awareness, state-level legal variations, and documentation barriers.
This means those most affected by and vulnerable to climate change have the fewest tools to prepare for weather shocks. But the combination of emerging technology and innovative approaches is beginning to break this cycle.
Using data to power climate resilience
Through agri-fintechs like DER that combine satellite data, on-the-ground farm information, weather forecasts, and market signals, and programs like the World Bank’s AgriConnect , women can gain timely advice, credit, and risk protection tailored to their realities. At the same time, lenders benefit from more accurate risk assessment, stronger repayment performance, and the confidence to expand into a new customer segment.
These innovations present three powerful opportunities for women farmers in particular.
1. Real-time data to improve farm productivity, AI-powered farm advice to improve productivity
When combined with weather forecasts and market information, AI generates hyper-targeted agricultural advisory that tells farmers exactly what and when to plant, the optimal inputs to apply, and how to optimize their fertilizer use based on their specific plot’s conditions.
For the women farmers that DER works with through the Odisha-based Bhuvikash Krish-E Farmer Producer Company (a legal entity that allows farmers to be shareholders, decision-makers, and beneficiaries), implementing these AI-driven recommendations has helped expand agricultural enterprises, driven higher productivity, diversified and increased income that can be reinvested to build resilient livelihoods and households, and strengthened their ability to better withstand climate variability. It has also helped them save time as it means fewer trips to their fields and targeted pest management.
2. Connecting women farmers to formal finance: The KhetScore
DER uses farm-level data inputs to generate a “KhetScore” —a digital profile of a farm that reflects land quality, crop patterns, and farming practices to inform lending decisions. By complementing traditional collateral and credit histories, such tools allow lenders to extend credit to previously underserved smallholder farmers.
KhetScore assesses creditworthiness based on farm-generated cash flow (not land ownership), opening formal credit to women who often lack land titles and are therefore excluded. To help ensure that women are included, DER requires that women be the primary or co-borrowers on all loans they apply for. According to DER, among new to credit (NTC) customers, 32% of primary borrowers are women (compared to 68% for men). Over time, access to responsible credit can help women build financial histories and broaden their use of formal financial services, ultimately helping them build resilience.
3. Managing risk through bundled insurance
For women smallholder farmers, traditional insurance is often inaccessible: climate risks raise premiums, high operational costs make coverage commercially unviable, and state programs like Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) often rely on area-based triggers, which may not fully reflect losses on individual farms.
Data and digitization are changing this. Following the success of bundled credit-insurance models, such as those pioneered by the Land and Agricultural Development Bank of South Africa, DER has developed a digitally enabled, lower‑cost approach suited to small, dispersed farms that uses picture-based analysis to reduce verification costs, enabling bite-sized insurance bundles with credit. This directly benefits women, who tend to be among the underserved, since insurance can enable access to loans at better terms, help maintain repayment histories, and reduce disruption in the event of crop failure. For lenders, insurance can reduce risk, making them more likely to expand credit to previously underserved smallholder farmers.
Ensuring more women farmers benefit from emerging agri-tech
Three key ingredients are needed for this model to scale beyond DER.
- Women’s groups: CGAP and IDH identified that collectives that organize women are an important business driver to strengthen rural women’s climate resilience and improve commercial performance for the businesses that serve them. These groups offer a vehicle for women to provide mutual support, share knowledge or resources, and collaborate on efforts to improve well-being. They can take various forms, ranging from FPOs, self-help groups (SHGs), community-based organizations, and cooperatives.
- Digital agri-infrastructure that works for women: India’s extensive digital infrastructure is gender neutral by design. Mechanisms that allow for assisted modes of leveraging the digital infrastructure are needed to ensure those that lack confidence with or access to digital tools – most often women — are not left behind. Solutions need to be customized to cater to women’s comfort with digital products, local languages, farming practices, regulatory environments, and the agricultural sector.
- Strategic partnerships: Robust and unique partnerships are required to ensure collaboration between the government (that holds land data, for example), technology companies, and financial service providers. As is evident through AgriStack—the Indian government’s effort to bring together multi-sectoral stakeholders to leverage data to improve outcomes for farmers – the public sector can play a role in setting up the systems, defining the architecture, and catalyzing coordination around improved quality and accessibility of relevant data. This ultimately reduces the costs and complexity for players like DER to serve smallholder farmers with inclusive financial products.
Technology alone is not enough to serve women smallholder farmers in India. Real progress will depend on gender-intentional design, infrastructure, and policy to ensure the benefits reach those who need them most.
