Browsing Topics
Choose a primary topic (based on our learning agenda) or popular topic at the right, or click "all topics" to view the full list of topics. Posts can be also be filtered by format or region.
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- Agribusinesses (value chain actors)
- Alternative data
- Asset financing
- CGAP
- Client Demand
- Client Voice
- Climate-Smart Agriculture
- Cost Efficiency
- Credit Assessment
- Delivery Channel
- Digital Financial Services
- Ecosystems for SHF finance
- Evidence on Impact
- Farmer Organizations
- Farmer Technical Assistance
- Financial services advisory
- Food Security
- Fund for Rural Prosperity
- Funders (donors/investors)
- Human Centered Design
Report: Smallholder farmers are in need of inputs such as fertilizers, improved seeds and planting material, and access to finance, delivered in a stable and cost efficient system. Insights from a new report, published by IDH, the Sustainable Trade Initiative, enable service providers to create these cost-effective and scalable solutions, empowering smallholders to grow and sustain their businesses.
Tool: Speaker presentations posted from the Learning Lab's October 2016 partner gathering where financial service providers and other practitioners shared experiences and research on digitally-enabled finance and customer centricity.
Analysis: The thirteenth briefing note in a series from the Initiative for Smallholder Finance, explores the latest practices from the climate finance community and the agricultural finance community to understand how new combined models can boost returns and attract new investors.
Analysis: The Learning Lab is researching how digitalization affects the business case for smallholder finance, specifically: what role do digital tools play in successful business models for lending to smallholders? Here we provide early findings from the research, in the form of a presentation from a Sep. 2016 workshop where Dalberg and the Lab discussed the results of organization surveys and expert interviews.
Report: The AGRA financial inclusion team has been working on an assessment of the business models of fifteen ICT4Ag solution providers in Kenya, Tanzania, and Ghana. The full report, executive summary, 15 case studies, and farmer videos are now available. In this blog, Hedwig Siewertsen, AGRA's Team Leader of Financial Inclusion, summarizes some of the findings from the research.
Analysis: CGAP’s National Survey(s) and Segmentation of Smallholder Households in Mozambique, Tanzania, and Uganda explores the financial, agricultural, and digital demands of smallholder households. The surveys are a groundbreaking effort to build a representative evidence base for the demand-side of the smallholder finance equation. The links above provide access to both summary reports and full micro datasets for each country, for further analysis. This blog summarizes a few of the key themes and specific variations across the three countries.
Report: Cutting edge approaches to rural and agricultural finance rely on varying degrees of digitalization to reach more customers, and reduce costs and risks of serving smallholders. However, when the the product deployed is itself digital, there are new risks to manage. This handbook presents a risk management framework for DFS.
Tool: On August 31 the Learning Lab team hosted a private webinar for partners where we shared rationale and approach to measuring customer satisfaction in the rural and agricultural finance industry. The presentation from this webinar, alongside a short summary of its learnings and the full webinar recording are now available for public viewing.
Analysis: The Learning Lab recently supported research by the MIX on detailed 2015 lending data from leading social lenders, who make up the Council on Smallholder Agricultural Finance (CSAF). The findings were summarized in the 2015 CSAF annual report, which takes a deeper look into the current state of the sector through the lens of donors, investors, and lenders. Dan Zook, Director of Investments at the Initiative for Smallholder Finance (ISF), unpacks some of the key highlights from the report, many of which corroborate and illustrate major insights from our study, Inflection Point.
Spotlight:
M-KOPA, a winner of the 2015 FRP Scaling Competition, has taken a leadership role in Solar Home System financing. Read more to learn how M-KOPA is expanding its business model to address rural farmers’ needs through innovative financing options.
Spotlight: New guest blog from Farming First uses two case studies from their recently released climate smart video and case study series to explain how climate smart agriculture practices enable smallholders to more effectively and reliably use finance for agriculture production.
Report: IIF and CFI Accion’s recently published report, “The Business of Financial Inclusion: Insights from Banks in Emerging Markets” digs into commercial banks and the role of digital technology in the emerging market, a concept the Lab is currently looking into for the RAF space.