English
Français
The GIZ project Programme pour le Développement rural et l’agriculture (ProDRA III) is aiming at strengthening the performance of producers of agricultural value chains in Togo. During on-going implementation, the major bottleneck to increase agricultural productivity and the farmers’ incomes appeared to be the limited access to financial products (loans, savings and insurance).
Since May 2017, AFC in cooperation with our strategic partner ADG started implementing the new field of action Financial Services to address this challenge within ProDRA.
Our main task is to interlink the MFIs and the farmers. With more than 500 service points and roughly 1.5 million customers (20% of total population), the MFIs are the proper entry point to improve financial inclusion of the rural population. However until now the demand of financial products is not met by the MFI, due to a set of typical challenges within rural, agricultural finance.
In order to interlink supply and demand side, our experienced and motivated team of experts will focus on the following set of capacity building measures:
- Strengthen the capacities of the MFI in the field of risk analysis, agricultural literacy and development of adapted products;
- Train the agricultural producers in various aspects of bookkeeping, accounting and financial literacy.
The project has been officially started during the kick-off workshop in June 2017 in Lomé. Our methodological approach has been embedded in ProDRA and the handover of the GIZ pilot to the new AFC team has been assured. All relevant stakeholders, including maize farmers actively discussed targets and activities. Due to the limited project duration and the fact that a first pilot in the field of financial services has already been conducted by GIZ, our team will
(a) Implement the activities in close cooperation with GIZ;
(b) Build on already existing activities and structures and;
(c) Approach the targets and indicators in a sustainable and pragmatic way.
For further information:
Jakob Lutz
Jakob.Lutz [at] afci.de