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Tool: On March 6 in Dakar, Senegal The MasterCard Foundation hosted a program launch announcing the work of RAF Learning Lab partners ICCO, AgDevCo, and Root Capital. Alongside the program launch the Learning Lab hosted two learning sessions on the opportunity for partnerships and digital tools to unlock smallholder finance. This blog includes a brief summary of the learning sessions alongside presentation materials and relevant resources.
Analysis: New research from Financial Sector Deepening Africa (FSDA) and Nathan Associates highlights agricultural lease finance as a way to expand access to finance for smallholders, allowing for greater mechanization of agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa. This blog summarizes some of the key opportunities and barriers to uptake and usage of lease finance - concluding with the recommendation of a potential fund that would help share the initial costs of agricultural equipment.
Analysis: Insights and trends on customer centric approaches in the rural and smallholder finance sector.
Media: On February 28 and March 1 the RAF Learning Lab team – in collaboration with Dalberg – hosted a webinar summarizing insights from our second Learning Brief, Better together: Last mile partnerships for smallholder finance.
Community: A new blog series, jointly authored by the Initiative for Smallholder Finance and the Learning Lab will share monthly sector trends in smallholder finance and next steps forward for FSPs, donors, and investors. The Pulse is rooted in key findings and recommendations highlighted in the ISF's and Lab's latest state of the sector report, Inflection Point.
Analysis: The second in the Lab's Learning Brief series, "Better together: Last mile business partnerships for smallholder finance,"* offers baseline insights for building or enabling businesses partnerships to better serve smallholders. These are early findings from an ongoing study of four value chain/technology players looking to partner with financial institutions.
Report: Mercy Corps' AFA program conducts country-level ecosystem reviews in coordination with its work to support the expansion of digital financial and non-financial services to smallholder farmers in Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia. These analyses are published as white papers in the "Fertile Ground" series. This is the Zambia white paper.
Report: Mercy Corps' AFA program conducts country-level ecosystem reviews in coordination with its work to support the expansion of digital financial and non-financial services to smallholder farmers in Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia. These analyses are published as white papers in the "Fertile Ground" series. This is the Tanzania white paper.
Report: KCB Group, a RAF Learning Partner, shares details on their current programming efforts as of 2016. Most specifically, the report highlights their USD 30 million partnership with The Mastercard Foundation, in which KCB has committed to offering financial services to 2 million smallholder farmers.
Analysis: Our learning brief explores the role of digital approaches (across the lending value chain) in making it possible to profitably serve the smallholder market at scale. What do the digital journeys of financial service providers entail? What results are FSPs seeing and what challenges do they face?
Analysis: Smallholder asset lender Juhudi Kilimo used a cloud-based management information system to improve its operational efficiency. Then it tested a new SMS reminder initiative, which proved promising in pilot but faced challenges during rollout. Elvin Walela tells this chapter in the story of Juhudi's digital journey.
Analysis: The fourteenth briefing note in a series from the Initiative for Smallholder Finance, the Dalberg Design Impact Group (DIG) explores the causes of low uptake in digital credit for smallholders to better understand how we can develop concrete product solutions to jump-start adoption of digital credit products by them.