Anchor Based Financing

Discover how our Anchor Based Financing techniques are transforming Rural Livelihoods

Through strategic anchor partnerships, we unlock financing opportunities that go beyond short-term credit—building enduring pathways for rural transformation. By aligning capital, technology, and sector expertise, we enable farmer collectives to scale operations, enhance productivity, and strengthen community livelihoods. Our approach ensures that every investment drives inclusive growth, measurable impact, and long-term prosperity across rural value chains.

Krishi Setu : Automating Last-Mile Agri-Finance

Krishi Setu Workflow Diagram

Krishi Setu is an AI-powered platform that digitizes and automates the entire farmer onboarding and loan preparation process, making rural credit fast, accurate, and scalable. The app captures farmer data including Aadhaar, PAN, photos, land and asset details, and instantly verifies documents. A backend team then validates the information through our ERP before the system automatically generates a complete bank-ready loan docket.

Krishi Setu’s AI engine applies lender rules, checks eligibility, interprets CIBIL scores, and filters out ineligible profiles so only qualified applications move forward. This reduces onboarding time from 1–1.5 hours to just 15 minutes, ensuring 99% accurate loan files and faster approvals. As a result, lenders benefit from reliable and error-free applications, FPOs and field partners get faster enrollments and instant recommendations, and Human Ventures achieves truly scalable, low-touch operations across geographies.

Potato Farming
Bio - Fermenter
Dairy Financing
Agroforestry
Sericulture
CLF-SHG Credit Models
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Potato Farming

About the Project: Human Ventures supports FPOs working with Samarth Agri in a potato contract farming programme with PepsiCo, enabling guaranteed offtake and quality compliance. The financing enables FPOs to procure certified, high-yield potato seed from PepsiCo improving yields and stabilising farmer incomes.

Need: Smallholder members require low-cost, small-ticket loans timed to the cropping cycle to purchase certified seed and inputs. Although funds exist within the system, beneficiaries lack an easy, transparent channel to access them for project-specific needs. Structured, timely credit is essential to translate the buyer commitment into higher productivity and contracted deliveries.

Challenge: Accessing low-cost institutional credit for working capital in high-input crops like potato. Accessing credit with this particular project structure involving Pepsi, Samarth Agri and the FPO was difficult due to the complexity of having multiple stakeholders.

HV Intervention: Partnered with NABKISAN and Samarth Agri to structure and facilitate financing under a buy-back model with PepsiCo, enabling assured markets and average farmer profits of ₹29,500 per acre.

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FPO Financing - Bio Fermenter

About the Project: Human Ventures, in partnership with GIZ, supports adoption of Jeevamrut-based organic fertiliser through on-farm bio-fermenters for climate-friendly apple production. The programme deploys solar-powered automatic bio-fermenters to lower chemical input costs, improve soil health and boost apple quality and yield.

Need: Establish sustainable, on-farm fertiliser solutions that reduce dependency on chemical fertilisers while maintaining the existing production cycle. Improve soil fertility and microbiome health to secure long-term, climate-resilient apple yields. Enable farmers and FPOs to capture higher market value through better quality and eco-friendly certification potential.

Challenge: Institutional finance treats bio-fermenters as a cost item; projected agronomic and quality benefits are undervalued by lenders. Upfront capital constraints prevent FPOs from procuring efficient, automated systems despite clear downstream revenue gains. Without financing, farmers continue expensive chemical regimes that degrade soil and limit value-addition opportunities.

HV Intervention: Facilitated ₹24.3 lakhs in financing (for 20 solar-powered automatic bio-fermenters, covering procurement and commissioning) by providing clarity to the banks, of the benefits that accrue from the improved quality of apples that use organic fertilisers. This enabled FPOs to produce organic fertilizer cost-effectively on-farm helping FPOs to obtain higher revenue streams from improved quality of the produce.

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Dairy Financing- Akshayakalpa

About: The largest organic dairy transforms smallholder dairy into viable, scaled businesses by pairing guaranteed milk procurement and premium retail branding with farmer-centric financing. The model targets sustained income uplift, aiming for individual farmer earnings of ₹1,00,000 per month through higher productivity, quality and market value.

Need: Shift dairy from a subsistence activity to a stable business so farmers commit long term and capture greater value. Provide access to asset and working capital that enables modern, productive dairy systems and fodder investment. Create predictable cash flows and market linkages so dairy farming competes with non-farm income opportunities and reduces attrition.

Challenge: Farmers lack collateral and tailored loan products, and have bad credit scores while lenders undervalue revenue from quality milk and branded procurement. Upfront costs for livestock, equipment and fodder systems create liquidity gaps that block scale. Without structured finance and assured markets, farmers cannot sustain investments long enough to realise higher income.

HV intervention: Enabled a tailored dairy financing product and streamlined loan applications through digital onboarding and bank partnerships. Structured loans agnostic of credit scores to cover asset purchase and operating costs, aligned with the largest organic dairy’s procurement so repayments are serviced from milk revenues first.

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Agroforestry

About the Project: Human Ventures, in collaboration with Rabobank Acorn and IORA Ecological Solutions, presents MegCare-an agroforestry initiative implemented in Meghalaya with the Meghalaya Basin Development Authority (MBDA). The programme integrates existing and new agroforestry models across farmer and community lands over 100,000+ hectares to restore ecosystems, strengthen rural livelihoods and generate certified carbon removal units (CRUs) under the Acorn framework.

Need: To scale agroforestry initiatives by enabling access to structured financing for long-term climate-resilient livelihoods. Agroforestry delivers ecological and livelihood benefits but requires multi-year investment horizons that smallholders cannot self-finance. Structured finance and credit products linked to carbon and ecosystem outcomes are necessary to convert ecological restoration into reliable farmer income. Unlocking finance at scale will drive landscape restoration while securing steady, diversified revenues for communities.

Challenge: Agroforestry requires patient capital-trees and carbon credit aggregation takes 5+ years to mature, making it difficult to attract conventional loans. Fragmented landholdings and varied cropping systems complicate aggregation, credit assessment and standardized loan design. Absent early cash flows, farmers face liquidity pressure and may abandon long-term systems despite clear ecological value.

HV Intervention: Human Ventures integrated intercropping for early income generation, making the model bankable, and facilitating credit access to scale the program. We are facilitating aggregation, monitoring and certification workflows, and coordinated finance disbursement tied to ecological milestones.

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Sericulture

About the project: The sericulture project was designed to help small and marginal farmers adopt mulberry sericulture as a profitable alternative to low income crops. Human Ventures worked with clusters of farmers in Beed and Gondia districts in Maharashtra, Betul and Barwani districts in Madhya Pradesh, and Kandhamal district in Odisha, aiming to build a full chain of support so that one acre of mulberry could earn about ₹2 lakh per year through cocoon production.

Need: Farmers with less than two acres of land faced stagnant incomes and risk from climate dependent cropping. At the same time, India imported close to 50 percent of the silk needed for domestic use. Sericulture was identified as a way to create regular employment, especially for women, while also contributing to import substitution and higher per acre income.

Challenge: Many farmers were not fully prepared to invest in new irrigation and rearing infrastructure, and there were gaps in technical skills for scientific rearing and crop management. Adoption across clusters stayed uneven, which affected consistency of cocoon quality, total production, and the ability to scale the model to the levels originally planned.

HV Intervention: Human Ventures facilitated bank loans through State Bank of India, arranged quality mulberry saplings and DFLs, and provided training aligned with Central Silk Board standards in partnership with local ground organisations. The team also set up forward linkages with buyers, including an FPO that offered a fixed purchase price for cocoons. While these interventions created awareness and some income improvement, the project ultimately reached fewer farmers and lower volumes than intended, serving more as a learning ground for future sericulture programs.

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CLF-SHG Credit Models

About the Project: Human Ventures, in collaboration with NABARD Goa and Goa State Rural Livelihood Mission (GSRLM) - strengthens Cluster Level Federations (CLFs) and their member Self-Help Groups (SHGs) by enabling streamlined access to micro-credit and working capital for livelihood and micro-enterprise activities. The programme digitises beneficiary flows and ties credit to community governance, improving reach and accountability across rural financial ecosystems.

Need: To provide low-cost, small-ticket loans to beneficiaries. The funds are already present in the system but an easy way to make these available for beneficiaries for various projects needs to be understood.

Challenge: There is a lack of transparent business plan evaluation, credit rating and disbursement system - which is due to the absence of a digital mechanism of evaluating business plans and beneficiaries.

HV Intervention: Built the Krishi Setu and Udyog Setu tech platforms for digital onboarding, KYC, and AI-based credit scoring - digitally equipping CLFs and RRBs which further enables high transparency and digital evaluation of the beneficiaries, allowing provision of loans agnostic of credit scores.

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