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Agriculture Finance for Smallholder Farmers

Dairy Value Chain Financing Support Project

Background

According to the Ministry of Commerce and Trade (2014), the dairy value chain has only 5% credit accessibility to farmers; 10% among Milk Collection Centres (MCCs) and 30% among milk kiosks with low average loan periods ranging from Rwf 200,000 (USD 247) to Rwf 2 million (2,472) from at least six months to one year. These low financing levels curtail the growth of the dairy industry in Rwanda. There exist huge financing opportunities throughout this value chain that financial institutions could tap into.

Access to Finance Rwanda in partnership with Heifer international has developed an innovative project to enhance finance flow within the dairy value chain. The project aims to provide smallholder farmers with opportunities to access formal financial services through a digital platform that links data, payment, and settlement mechanisms between financiers, Milk Collection Centers and dairy farmers.

The overall project goal is to ensure farmers benefit from access to digital financial services leveraging dairy data to increase milk productivity and household incomes.

Project overview/Key highlights:

Project name Dairy Value Chain Financing Support Project
Implementing partners
Project period (2 years) February 2017-January 2019- extended until September 2020

PROJECT TARGET

0 Years
Project extended until September 2020
+ 0
Farmers acquire knowledge and skills on Financial literacy capacity and digital payments
+ 0
Farmers access payments via mobile phones
0
Farmers purchase livestock insurance as risk mitigation mechanism
0 MCCs
to be used to set up a new and improved financial management system

Project achievements so far

  • A digital cloud-based technology platform that links data, payment, and settlement mechanisms between financiers, milk collection cooperatives was developed and deployed to 20 pilot milk collection centres (MCCs).
  • Business data for 17,585 farmers was collected and stored on to the platform and this provides a good basis to initiate credit scoring for each individual farmers, making possible the disbursement of short and medium term loans by participating financial institutions.

  • The project has supported more than 4,500 farmers purchase insurance policies to provide a layer of risk mitigation.
  • More than 4500 dairy farmers were trained on Financial literacy  and digital payments skills.