Challenges and Opportunities in Providing Small Farmers Equal Access to Wealth via Rural Credit in Brazil

Agriculture is impacted by multiple variables such as weather, soil, crop, stocks, socioeconomic context, cultural aspects, supply and demand, just to name a few. Hence, understanding this domain and identifying challenges faced by stakeholders is hard to scale due to its highly localized nature. This work builds upon six months of field research and presents challenges and opportunities for stakeholders acting in the rural credit ecosystem in Brazil, highlighting how small farmers struggle to access higher values in credit. This study combined two methods for understanding challenges and opportunities in rural credit ecosystem in Brazil: (1) a study that took place in a community of farmers in Brazil and it was based on participatory observations of their work processes and interactions of 20 informants (bank employees and farmers); (2) design thinking workshops with teams from 3 banks, counting on 15-20 participants each. The results show that key user experience challenges are tightly connected to the heterogeneity of farmer profiles and contexts of use involving technology available, domain skills, level of education, and connectivity, among others. In addition to presenting data collected from interaction with informants and experiences resulting from active participant observation, we discuss a holistic view of how recommender systems could be used to promote better bank-farmer interactions, improve farmer experience in the whole process, and promote equitable access to loans beyond microcredit.