Earlier this month, Kenyan agricultural insurance technology company Pula was named a finalist for the 2026 Earthshot Prize, selected from more than 7,000 applications worldwide. The recognition puts Pula alongside companies working on some of the biggest challenges in climate and sustainability, and brings renewed attention to a business that says it has reached 24 million smallholder farmers across Africa with crop insurance.

Pula’s model is built around a simple premise: insurance becomes viable at scale when it is embedded in programmes farmers already use, rather than sold to them one by one. The company works with governments, lenders, agribusinesses and insurers to distribute cover through agricultural programmes, while using satellite data, machine learning and other technology to reduce the cost of assessing risk and claims. Pula says it reached profitability in 2022 and is targeting 100 million farmers by 2030.

In an exclusive interview with Launch Base Africa’s Udoh Charles Rapulu, co-founder and CEO Thomas Njeru discusses how the company moved from building insurance products to solving the distribution and data problems around them, what more than 800 million data points have revealed about African agriculture, and why he believes financial sustainability is essential to reaching farmers at scale.

Thomas, huge congratulations on the Earthshot Prize recognition. Personal milestone aside, what does becoming an Earthshot finalist say about the role of agritech in global climate resilience?

Thank you. Being named an Earthshot finalist is a great honour, but also a massive responsibility. Smallholder farmers did not create the climate crisis we find ourselves in, yet they face its consequences every single season. For too long, their resilience has sat at the margins of the global climate conversation. This recognition brings it closer to the centre.

It also recognises the farmers themselves, the teams at Pula, the governments we have partnered with, and the insurance business partners who have spent years making this work. I see it as an opportunity to use that attention to mobilise finance and resources to reach more farmers across the markets we operate in.

You’re on the finalist list alongside massive renewable energy developers operating at utility scale. What will it actually take to hit your 2030 goal of 100 million farmers?

Looking at the list of finalists, what strikes me is the variety. It is a demonstration that addressing climate change requires different solutions attacking different angles — from how energy is produced to how people adapt to shocks they did not cause. Our contribution is helping people understand and manage the climate shocks they already face.

On reaching 100 million farmers — our goal is to get there by 2030, and we have already reached 24 million. That ambition comes from a decade of learning about what it actually takes to deliver insurance at scale.

The first requirement is reaching farmers through programmes they already use. Directly selling insurance to farmers does not work — we learned that early. The programmes that work are agricultural input support, seed and fertiliser subsidy programmes, loans, and similar existing infrastructure. The second requirement is reliable data, so that our insurance partners can price risk accurately and farmers can trust the payouts they receive. The third, and perhaps most critical, is partnership — with governments, lenders, agribusinesses — to make insurance sustainable, scalable, and affordable.

That is why we launched the 100 Million Futures programme — to bring governments, lenders, agribusinesses, technology companies, and funders together around the systems needed to reach farmers at scale. It has five building blocks: Connect, See, Protect, Grow, and Recover. Connect links farmers to digital identities and agricultural services — the infrastructure needed to address information asymmetry in agriculture. See means using better data and forecasting to understand climate risk. Protect means delivering affordable insurance. Grow means building the funding and capacity to take these programmes to national scale. And Recover means getting payouts and financial services to farmers quickly after a shock.

Our aim through this programme is to mobilise over $200 million in catalytic support across 20 countries by 2030. This cannot be done by Pula alone, and our call to action is to invite governments, insurers, financial institutions, and investors to join us. Together, we can ensure one bad season does not erase everything a farmer has built.

You grew up on a small farm in rural Kenya and later became an actuary at Deloitte. What was the specific moment more than a decade ago when you realised that the skills you had built in corporate finance could be applied to the problem you had experienced as a child?

It was a combination of experiences rather than a single moment. Growing up around farming — my parents are still smallholder farmers — I experienced first-hand what it means to be one drought or one flood away from complete poverty. What it means when an entire family’s livelihood depends on a farm, and one drought can wipe it out entirely.

Later I studied actuarial science and then worked in the insurance industry. That taught me to understand how risk can be measured, why risk has to be proactively managed, and how risk can be shared. Working in insurance, I realised the big gap: insurance companies do not cover smallholder farmers. That got me into a quest to understand why. I started realising it’s a product problem, a distribution problem, a complex systems problem.

I began asking why the same solution available to large businesses and large farmers so rarely reached smallholder farmers, who are actually very exposed to these risks. If you think about the African context, the majority of our production is driven by smallholder farmers. Our GDP is reliant on agriculture. So providing insurance to such a critical component of our economy — especially when we talk about food security, import substitution, and so on — became increasingly important.

I became convinced there was something I call a problem fit: I have a passion for agriculture and an understanding of insurance. I always say my heart is in agriculture and my brain is in insurance. It’s a mix of where my heart and my brain sit. And I could see how the solutions we develop could contribute to the development of the continent.

You started in 2015 — a time when insurance was a relatively new concept for most African smallholder farmers. What was the hardest part of those early years?

Coming from a technical background, I naturally assumed it was a product problem. So I spent a lot of time building what I thought was a world-class insurance product. The hardest lesson of our first year was discovering that a good insurance product is only part of the answer.

You have to figure out how to make the cost make sense and work with programmes farmers are already familiar with — embedding insurance into things like loans and input support programmes, seed and fertiliser. And we can’t be an island. We have to work in partnership with the existing insurance industry, especially for balance sheet capacity and regulatory requirements. That partnership with insurance companies changed the conversation with regard to scale.

Leveraging existing infrastructure is what enabled us to reach farmers and earn their trust. The other hard part was simplifying the product and explaining the concept. Insurance tends to be complex and technical. You can imagine having to explain it to farmers, some of whom never went to school. You have to figure out how to explain it very practically, so they understand how it works and why it benefits them.

Pula is ultimately a technology company as well as an insurance business. Looking back, how important was technology in convincing insurers that it was possible to underwrite low-income farmers profitably, especially when the premiums and individual policies are relatively small?

Traditional insurance relies heavily on individual sales through brokers and agents, as well as on assessing risk before and after a loss. But when you are serving millions of smallholder farmers, that model can become difficult to sustain economically.

So we developed product innovation that allows us to compare risk in a defined area against historical benchmarks, leveraging field teams, data, and technology — satellite imagery and machine learning — to measure what happened. This allows us to assess whether there has been a significant or systemic shock in a particular agricultural zone. It significantly reduced the cost of assessment and the cost of determining claims.

That was the biggest selling point to our insurance partners, to farmers, and to the partners paying the premium, because they could see the cost of insurance was much lower. Combined with the product itself, we leverage technology heavily — from mobile to satellite — to reduce the cost of registration, data collection, and administration. We built an end-to-end system that allows us to price, collect data, and automate loss assessment and data checks. That integrated system is what makes scale possible and reduces the total unit cost.

How does a typical partnership with insurers and distributors actually work in practice?

First, we come in as a technical partner. We have the product, the pricing and underwriting capability, the systems, and the data. Think of it as us cooking the meal — this is the product, these are the parameters — and then the insurance companies take on the risk and carry it on their balance sheet.

Importantly, we don’t come empty-handed. We’re also involved in engaging agribusinesses, governments and the partners we work with, so we bring the customer and embed insurance into those programmes. We go to insurance partners as a partner: we have this customer, the customer has accepted this product, and these are the parameters and the risk assessment of the exposure.

We also support insurers in getting additional insurance capacity. We have a panel of about 30 insurance companies globally that take on risks local insurers cannot. So we provide an end-to-end solution that brings together the product, the customer, the data and the insurance capacity.

And speaking of partners like the Bayer Foundation, through which you aim to insure millions of farmers, how do you structure these partnerships to ensure they become commercially sustainable rather than permanently dependent on subsidies, and what tells you that a market is ready to stand on its own?

Sustainability is top of mind in everything we do. We designed that partnership with a path beyond the first grant. We build trust through the pilot, we pay out, and we bring down the cost of delivering cover to farmers. The government can contribute in reach and market access.

We primarily use the premium support — which is a subsidy — to help farmers experience insurance for the first time. A farmer who has never seen an insurance payout may understandably hesitate to spend scarce money on a premium. The Bayer Foundation partnership gives farmers a chance to see how cover works. Over time, as they see its value, the aim is for premiums to become part of the quality input credit and other farm investments they already pay for — with farmers increasingly contributing themselves.

The pilot offers an example of premium subsidy sustainability. An initial tranche supported cover for about 100,000 to 300,000 farmers. Then the government cleared the money and continued to fund it. That example shows a route from external support to local ownership.

That said, I think there’s no single timetable for knowing when a market is ready to stand on its own. We look at affordability and who benefits. Can a farmer contribute a modest share of the premium through the seeds or inputs they already buy? Can a lender contribute because insurance helps the farmer keep producing and repaying? Does the government see enough value to make the cover part of an ongoing agricultural programme rather than a one-off project? That’s critical.

Then there’s how organised the agricultural infrastructure is, because that determines how premiums can be collected at scale. That means looking at the digitisation of the agricultural ecosystem.

All of these factors vary by market, and you don’t need to have all the answers upfront. But there need to be strong indications that these pieces can come together.

Pula has collected more than 800 million data points over the years. What is the most valuable and unexpected insight that data has produced?

We started collecting data first to understand technical risk and to make insurance work for whole groups of farmers. To collect that data at farm level, we had to build field operations capability and the ability to process data and run quality checks — because payouts, millions of dollars, are paid based on that data. You need to make sure it’s accurate.

What surprised me in that process is how many other problems came from the same root. Farmers are missing from government records — talk to a minister of agriculture and they don’t have a database of farmers. Lenders don’t understand exactly what’s happening on the ground. No single farmer registry exists in most of these countries. People don’t know what farmers planted, so there are no farm activity records. Decisions about agriculture on the continent are made based on gut feeling and limited data.

We realised that when you register farmers, map their farms, and connect those circles through digital public infrastructure, the data can serve many purposes. Governments can accurately target subsidies and agricultural services. Lenders can better understand farmer activity and offer finance. And they can use field and climate data to improve risk modelling and deliver insurance.

That changed how we think about Pula’s work. We realised insurance is a starting point — but the infrastructure behind it can help farmers access opportunity in a good season as well as cover when things go wrong.

You reached profitability in 2022. Did that change how you think about scale?

Not at all. There’s one thing I always say: scale is only achieved when there is financial sustainability. Profitability did not change our purpose. From the beginning, Rose and I believed we could build a sustainable business that reached farmers who had been left out of insurance. It’s how we set up the company. At Pula, we focus on generating revenue and reinvesting it into the company. Financial discipline was part of the model from the start.

I always say the so-called trade-off between impact and profitability is a little overplayed. If you think about the most impactful solutions in the world, they are also profitable — which means they are sustainable. You need a model that is self-sustaining to scale to hundreds of millions. Anything that doesn’t do that will, sooner or later, run out of money.

You have worked with several African governments on national insurance programmes. What is the most important lesson about public-private partnership in agriculture — what has worked, and what has consistently failed?

When it comes to governments, the first thing is accepting that they are among the biggest investors in agriculture. In many places, they are also the insurer of last resort — when there’s a drought or a flood and there isn’t enough food, governments end up responding with emergency assistance. Insurance gives them a way to plan before the shock and provide financial support through existing agricultural programmes.

What makes a government partnership work is clarity. We need to know who pays for the cover, how losses are measured and how payouts are triggered. In Zambia, for instance, we demonstrated that this can work at scale when insurance is connected to a national programme.

But government partnerships are also about understanding how a particular government works. You have to understand where it is in its agenda and meet it where its most pressing needs are. You could go to one government and they already have a farmer registry. You could go to another and they don’t — so maybe you help them get a farmer registry before you bring the concept of insurance. You have to meet governments where they are, at their most pressing needs.

The same applies to product design. What risks does the government care about, and which crops? In Mozambique, cyclones may be the priority. In Zambia, it may be drought. In Nigeria, there may be floods. Each government has its own priorities and local context.

We’ve made our own mistakes, and most of them can be traced to :  how well do you understand the local context? Another critical thing is understanding the budgeting process, how procurement works, and how decisions are made. Is it centralised or decentralised? What powers does the minister have? What powers does the permanent secretary have? This changes from government to government, country to country — and sometimes within the same country, between regimes, a lot changes.

What exactly are the biggest challenges partnering with governments?

We’ve partnered with the governments of Mozambique, Uganda, Zambia, Nigeria, Angola, and Kenya — a range of governments. I can say the biggest is the speed of decision-making. Sometimes it’s not as fast as you’d like. And there are very many stakeholders. No single decision-maker can cover everything — not even the president can simply make it happen. You have to align and get everyone on board. So many people. That makes the process slow and extremely complex, which is a function of the checks and balances governments have built.

You plan to expand beyond Africa into Brazil and India. What are the biggest challenges of taking a model built in Africa into those markets?

Farmers in Brazil and India share fundamental commonalities with farmers in Africa — they face the risk of putting enormous effort and resources into a season only to have it destroyed by a climate shock. The need for accessible and affordable cover exists across all of these geographies.

But how we respond to that need must be entirely local. Different crops, different farming practices, different existing insurance infrastructure, different regulatory regimes, and different networks of farmers and partners to work with. We will have to go there, listen carefully, understand which partners can be trusted, adapt the product to the actual risks and crops in each context, and build a model that is genuinely fit for purpose. We have already done pilots in Pakistan and Bangladesh as part of building that international understanding. This expansion is part of our near-term plan.

Beyond the prize money, what does the Earthshot recognition give you access to that you wouldn’t have today?

The funding would allow us to develop new solutions and expand our reach. But beyond that, Earthshot brings together people who can develop solutions across different parts of the challenge. Those relationships with parties across the ecosystem — governments, insurers, finance, technology partners — could take us much further and closer to the 100 million farmers.

So it’s an ecosystem of partners. And the visibility the recognition brings also helps us achieve our long-term ambitions.

What are the most important lessons you have learned as a founder of an insurtech company in Africa — things you wish you had known earlier?

I think we focus too much on the product and not enough on distribution. How to reach millions of people, what that route to market looks like, what the economics of that distribution actually are — these questions do not get nearly enough attention from entrepreneurs early on. You can design a solution that meets a real need, but reaching millions of farmers one by one is prohibitively expensive. We had to learn, sometimes the hard way, that embedding insurance into programmes and products that people already use is the only path to scale. And how you distribute your product should actually shape how you design it — the sequence matters.

I would say to any entrepreneur building in insurance or agriculture on the continent: invest serious time in understanding your distribution model. It is usually what separates companies that stay small from those that genuinely scale.

When you started in Kenya in 2015, there was a prevailing perception that Africans neither understood nor wanted insurance. How difficult was that reality in practice, and what fundamental misconception did you have to challenge — both in the market and in your own thinking?

Building a business around a problem that has never been solved at scale is always difficult. There is no textbook. You learn by doing and by failing.

The biggest lesson — and the thing I most wish I had known earlier — is that failure is the best teacher available to an entrepreneur. The instinct is to fear it and avoid it. But the right approach is to fail fast, extract the lesson, adjust, and try again. Set up a feedback mechanism that tells you when something is not working as quickly as possible, then accept it and try differently.

Where founders go wrong is getting too attached to a specific solution. We are told never to give up, and we take that to mean never abandoning the particular approach we have built. But the real instruction is never give up on solving the problem. There may be many ways to solve the same problem, and if the market is consistently telling you that one approach does not work, that is not noise — it is information. The worst thing you can do is keep pushing the same solution while the world is giving you feedback to change course.

I would say that is the single most important thing I have learned in a decade of building Pula.

Finally — what would you say to a young African who grew up on a farm, who wonders whether there is a future for them in agriculture or in building technology solutions like yours?

I would tell them that everything they learned growing up is extraordinarily valuable. They understand the problem from the inside. They see what solutions actually need to do because they have lived the challenge. Someone sitting in an office cannot design for that reality the way someone who has lived it can.

And the future of Africa is very much tied to the future of agriculture. We need to feed our people. The productivity gap between African agriculture and the rest of the world represents one of the largest remaining economic opportunities on the continent. There is a future here — in farming itself, and in building the finance, technology, and services that make farming viable and sustainable.

My advice is simple: start with a problem you understand and care deeply about. Then listen carefully to the people living with it. That is where your solutions begin. They begin with lived experience.

Thomas Njeru is co-founder and CEO of Pula, an agricultural insurance technology company that has reached 24 million farmers across Africa and is a 2026 Earthshot Prize finalist. Pula works with governments, insurers, lenders, and agribusinesses across Africa and is expanding internationally through its 100 Million Futures programme.