Across sub-Saharan Africa, small-scale farmers form the foundation of national and regional economies unless it rains too much or too little and their crops fail. The solution is insurance, at a vast, continental scale, and at a very low, affordable cost. Rose Goslinga, of Kenya and Germany, and her team pioneered an unconventional way to give farmers whose crops fail early a second chance at a growing season.

“I insure the rains,” said Goslinga on a TED Talks video. Raised in a family of missionaries, Goslinga saw her father build a psychiatric hospital in Tanzania. In 2008 she was working for the Ministry of Agriculture in Rwanda when she got the idea for a new business.

Goslinga founded the Syngenta Foundation’s Kilimo Salama program — Swahili for “safe farming.” Last year, it insured 185,000 farmers in Kenya and Rwanda against drought, and spun into a company called ACRE.

The insured farmers owned an average of half an acre and paid on average two euros  ($2.64 US) in annual premiums.

Micro insurance for a small-scale farmers in the middle of Africa relies on technology and cloud data, Goslinga said.

Rather than using farm visits to determine damages, cloud data determines when payouts are due to farmers. Building this program took Goslinga six years and tested her aptitude for creative problem-solving, from figuring out how to get farmers to trust insurance companies to creating technological solutions to help map which farmers are using the product, according to TED.com.

Satellites going back as far as 1984 measured whether there were clouds or not and provided a pretty good estimate on chance of drought.

“We also devise agronomic algorithms which tell us how much rain a crop needs and when,” Goslinga said. “At the end of (corn-planting) season, you don’t want it to rain.” Her company’s prime customers didn’t trust insurance and it was hard to persuade them to advance the insurance company money.

Just 4.4 percent of Africans bought insurance in 2012 and half of those were in South Africa. “We tried selling direct to farmers with very little success,” Goslinga said. “Then we realized there are many companies working with farmers. These organizations became our customers.”

Goslinga and her team convinced a seed company to price the cost of insurance into every bag of seed. In every bag they packed a card that had a number on it. When the farmers opened the card they’d text in the number and that number would help the insurance company locate the farmers and allocate them to a satellite pixel. “A satellite would then measure the rainfall for the next three weeks and if it didn’t rain we’d replace their seed,” she said.

It was a replanting guarantee and it’s why selling insurance can be a good thing, Goslinga said. “I believe today we have the tools to enable African farmers to take control of their destiny.”