The Mastercard Foundation Rural and Agricultural Finance Learning Lab is thrilled to take ownership of the Smallholder Finance Product Explorer, a project funded by the Mastercard Foundation & the Open Society Foundations, and implemented by One Acre Fund and MIX from 2016-2019. Integrating this dataset with the Lab’s current data platform will ensure users have easy access to a one-stop-shop for critical smallholder finance data.
Limited information on smallholder finance product design has historically prevented financial service providers from meeting the financing needs of smallholder farmers.
With over 450 million smallholder farmers globally, these farmers and their households need access to financial services to help increase farm productivity, reduce their vulnerability to unexpected shocks, and improve their livelihoods. Yet the current supply of financing available to them, ~$50 billion, represents only a quarter of the estimated total need of this population. Part of the issue is that financial service providers face high resource constraints to develop and deploy financial products that meet the needs of smallholder farmers.
The Smallholder Finance Product Explorer sought to catalyze...
