There’s a $200 billion deficit of financing for smallholder farmers. Find out how groups working with the Initiative for Smallholder Finance are bridging this gap.
Filmed as part of Farming First’s #SDG2countdown campaign, exploring SDG2.3 on doubling agricultural productivity and incomes.
Music: Ben Sounds
In this guest blog post, the Executive Director of the Initiative for Smallholder Finance outlines three key findings from a new report on how to improve smallholder farmers’ access to finance.
The demand for smallholder financing is staggering. Over 270 million smallholder farmers in the regions of Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South and Southeast Asia require over USD 200 billion in financing to grow their businesses and improve their livelihoods.
But this demand is largely unmet; formal financial institutions and value chain actors meet less than a sixth of this need. Today the Initiative for Smallholder Finance released the joint publication Inflection Point with the Rural and Agricultural Finance Learning Lab – an initiative of The MasterCard Foundation jointly implemented by GDI and Dalberg – that explores new sophisticated approaches to meet this need. The study finds that doubling the industry’s projected annual growth (from roughly 7% to 14%) would allow these providers to meet more than half the need by 2025. Continue reading