Credit for eighty thousand farms
“Kwame Mensah left banking to prove smallholder farmers were never the risk the models said they were.”
By JOS Editorial
published August 12, 2026updated November 4, 2026
For eight years Kwame Mensah's job was to say no to farmers. The models told him they were too risky.
At Volta he rebuilt the model from rainfall data, cooperative records and repayment history, and found default rates below those of the bank's urban borrowers.
The farmers were never the risk. Our data was.
