Credit history already exists. It just sits in the wrong place.
Ethiopia's savings and credit cooperatives hold years of savings, share and repayment records for millions of members. None of it reaches a credit bureau, so a member who has repaid every loan for a decade still...
A loan book with zero defaults is not a risk-free loan book.
Small cooperatives and new lenders often have no recorded defaults yet, so a standard model puts their risk at zero. Insurers, regulators and investors will not accept that number, and they are right not to.